SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: W. TODD KANEKO

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NORTHWEST POEM
by W. Todd Kaneko

You will find no herons perched
in this poem. No salmonberries or pine
cones on sodden paths through cedar.
But here is an old woman who slices
her calendar into weeks lost and weeks
to come—those piles sifting together
while she waits for the leaves to turn
into blankets full of moths and ravens.

Here is a girl who dwells in dollhouses
deep in this poem, porcelain boys hiding
fingers from whales’ teeth and butterfly
knives. There are no miles of shoreline
lapping at ends of days like wolves,
no fishladders swarming with sockeye,
only a skeleton where the ocean once was.

Extinction begins as absence, ends gaping
like a surgery, a hole in my chest
marking that mythology we call home.
Mount Rainier does not drift phantomlike
in this poem, but here is that old woman,
crooked under the weight of a century.
She waves off that flock of dark birds
thronging overhead, threatening to pluck
eyes from sockets, tongues from mouths,
until all we can discern is the tide washing
over bare feet, the sound of wings.


(“Northwest poem” previously appeared in Lantern Review and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)

W. Todd Kaneko lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His stories and poems can be seen in Puerto Del Sol, Crab Creek Review, Fairy Tale Review, Portland Review, Southeast Review, Blackbird and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. He teaches at Grand Valley State University.

Editor’s Note: In response to today’s poem I say, “Thank God for stunning moments in poetry!” If not God, then The Universe, Creative Energy, The Muse. Here’s to W. Todd Kaneko’s muse, at the very least. She is a creature to be awed and honored.

Want to read more by and about W. Todd Kaneko?
Blackbird
Superstition Review
Word Riot

Is There a Gene for That?

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PKU support wristbands. Photo credit: Mid-Atlantic Connection for PKU and Allied Disorders (MACPAD), http://www.macpad.org. Used with permission.

Is There a Gene for That?
By John Unger Zussman

In the eight years since the human genome was sequenced, the search has been on for genes that underlie various diseases and disorders. We seem to be obsessed with genetic explanations for human physiology and behavior.

And when we find them, we often assume that biology is inescapable destiny. For example, some women with no evidence of cancer, but with one of the breast cancer mutations (BRCA1 or BRCA2), choose to have preventive mastectomies rather accept the elevated risk of breast cancer they have inherited. In the race between nature and nurture, nature seems to be winning—at least in our minds.

I want to argue here that nature vs. nurture is the wrong way to think about this question. Not everyone with a BRCA mutation develops breast cancer. Something must be intervening between genetics and outcome. The problem with BRCA is we don’t know what.

There are other conditions, however, where we do know the intervening factors. So, to illustrate this new perspective, let’s examine a serious disease called phenylketonuria.

Never heard of it? Perhaps you’ve noticed the fine print on a can of diet soda that says Phenylketonurics: Contains phenylalanine. If you’ve wondered what those words mean and whether you should avoid diet soda—you should, but not because of the warning—read on.

Phenylketonuria (FEE-nil-KEE-tun-YUR-ia, but you can call it PKU) is a rare gene-linked condition that affects about 1 out of 10–15,000 people in the U.S. Phenylketonurics have trouble producing an enzyme that metabolizes the essential amino acid phenylalanine (one of the building blocks of proteins). Phenylalanine is found in most proteins in the human diet (including breast milk) and the artificial sweetener NutraSweet (aspartame), which is used in many “sugar-free” food products and over-the-counter medicines. If phenylalanine builds up in the blood, it can outcompete other amino acids in transport across the blood-brain barrier, starving the brain of other amino acids that are necessary for development. Serious cognitive impairment can result, including mental retardation, ADHD, brain damage, and seizures.

In developed countries, most newborns are screened for PKU soon after birth by testing blood for phenylketones. If PKU is diagnosed, parents are advised to start the child on a special diet low in phenylalanine. Some phenylalanine is necessary, but it must be strictly limited. This means severe restrictions on meat, chicken, fish, eggs, nuts, cheese, legumes, milk, and other dairy products, and no aspartame. Infants’ diets are often supplemented with special formula; as the child grows, pills or special protein foods can substitute. By following this diet, phenylketonurics can avoid phenylalanine buildup and its serious effects, and lead fully normal lives.

When I first lectured about PKU years ago, it was believed that phenylketonurics could go off the special diet by age 5-6 and no further damage would result. However, later research confirmed the benefits of extending the diet to age 18, and now, “for life.”

Since PKU is caused by an anomaly in a single gene that interferes with enzyme production, you might think of it as a textbook example of a completely genetic disorder. (Technically, it’s a recessive autosomal disorder, in which the child inherits one copy of the mutation from each parent.) And from the point of view of a child fed a “normal” diet, you’d be right. Whether she suffers the cognitive damage of PKU depends completely on whether she has two copies of the mutation. It’s 100% nature and 0% nurture, right?

Well, no. Because diet mediates the effect of the gene. So consider the situation from the point of view of a child with two copies of the mutation. Whether she suffers the cognitive damage of PKU depends completely on her diet. It’s 0% nature and 100% nurture!

 

Diet

Normal

Low-phenylalanine

Gene

Normal

Normal

Normal

PKU mutation

Cognitive impairment

Normal

Something is wrong here, and I would argue that it’s our way of considering nature and nurture in “either/or” opposition. Nature and nurture always work together in “both/and” collaboration. It’s the interaction of nature and nurture that determines our outcomes. In other words, it’s 100% nature and 100% nurture.

When you think about it, that’s true almost by definition. Genes are not directly apparent in our physiology and behavior; they are always expressed through the physical environment of our bodies, brains, and their surroundings. In a recent blog post, California geriatrician Walter Bortz talks about the Pima Indians of Arizona, who have one of the highest rates of type 2 diabetes in the world.

When these folks pursue their very physically active lives south of the border, in Mexico, they have no diabetes. But as soon as they cross north of the Rio Grande, they find McDonald’s and a far-more leisurely life.  They soon thereafter develop diabetes. Their genes certainly have not changed during their trip north, but their lifestyle did.

If the Pima have an underlying genetic predisposition for diabetes—and no such genes have yet been found—it is masked until they enter the world of fast food and couch surfing.

(Bortz is an octogenarian marathon runner who just published his seventh book, Next Medicine, a dire diagnosis and optimistic prescription for the American health care system that is well worth reading.)

When you start to look for the nature/nurture interaction, you see it everywhere. We generally think of physical height as highly heritable. But the genes for tallness can be undermined by poor diet. Bortz cites research by John Komlos of the University of Munich, who has studied population height over time. Two hundred years ago, the average Dutch man was 3 inches shorter than the average American. Now, he is 3 inches taller, at 6’1”. Genes don’t change this quickly—but diet and nutrition do. “America has gone from being the tallest nation in the world,” observes Komlos, “to the fattest.”

In the last few decades, we have learned a great deal about the factors that influence genetic expression. Everything goes into the mix, from the prenatal environment of your mother’s womb, to the viruses you happen to be exposed to, to the billions of microbes that live in your gut, to the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the food you eat. (Of course, these factors can also cause mutations in our genes, not part of our genetic inheritance, that can cause cancer and other disorders.)

In addition, the whole science of epigenetics has emerged—the study of what turns genes on and off—telling us that environmental factors like diet, behavior, and environmental toxins are key. I’ll leave epigenetics to a future post, but significantly, these epigenetic switch settings can be passed down to future generations. Not only does environment influence the way genes are expressed, it also directly influences those genes themselves.

So the next time you hear a claim that some characteristic or quality is 80% (or 50% or 20%) genetic, think twice. At best, it’s an oversimplification; at worst, it’s wrong. Many factors intervene between gene and outcome. Nature and nurture are invariably, inextricably intertwined. If we understand that, we can make wiser decisions about our health and our lives.

Sources:

To learn more about PKU, see Wikipedia, PubMed Health, or the National Society for Phenylketonuria. I also found good online explanations of PKU by Tracy Beck and Dr. Janet Starr Hull (who takes on aspartame as well).

Copyright © 2011, John Unger Zussman. All rights reserved.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: CATHERINE PIERCE

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FIREFLY
by Catherine Pierce

Its six legs coated with disease, it’s vulgar
like the aphid, the earwig. Its eyes are nightmare

globes. It does not love you or thank you
for the glass jar with air holes. Still, you want it

in your hands. Not for its yellow light like the soft
glow in the wooded cabin. Not for the vibrating

wings against your palms like champagne
bubbles bursting. Not even for the perfect

metaphors that ride on its sunflower-seed back—
the catching of a gone childhood, the memory

of keeping something alive. You pursue it
because it’s a slow beast, easily captured. Because

it hovers and floats. Because you can win at this,
and because it will fly off when you unfold

your hands, single-minded, unmoved by its loss.

 
(“Firefly” previously appeared in AGNI and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Catherine Pierce is the author of Famous Last Words (Saturnalia, 2008) and The Girls of Peculiar (forthcoming from Saturnalia in 2012). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Best American Poetry 2011, and elsewhere. She lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where she teaches and co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

Editor’s Note: I saw my first firefly this summer. I know, for those of you who grew up in the Midwest or on the East Coast this is a bit blasphemous, but we don’t have fireflies in San Francisco. I’ve dreamt of seeing one for as long as I can remember, and this summer, when conditions were right, someone who loves me very much and wanted to make my dream of fireflies a reality took me to an enchanted garden, and, lo and behold–magical creatures of my imagination! To me, today’s poem is as if looking at fireflies through Alice’s Looking Glass. I never understood why people would want to contain the creatures, how children could tear their glowing orbs from their bodies and wear them on the tips of their fingers.

Today’s poem is about the darker side of the allure of the firefly. Those human traits that make people want to capture them, to keep them in jars, to pursue only for the sake of the chase. Of course, as with so much poetry, today’s poem is also about human nature. “It does not love you or thank you / for the glass jar with air holes. Still, you want it / in your hands… Because you can win at this, / and because it will fly off when you unfold /your hands, single-minded, unmoved by its loss.”

Want to read more by and about Catherine Pierce?
Catherine Pierce Official Website
The Paris Review
Blackbird
Diode
Anti-Poetry

To Have Squeezed the Universe Into a Ball

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To Have Squeezed the Universe Into a Ball:
German Expressionism at MoMA

by David Gibbs

The exhibit, German Expressionism: Works From the Collection, at the Museum of Modern Art takes the viewer through the transition of early twentieth century Europe, with its curiosity and reliance on the seedy undercurrent of society; its prostitution, drinking, and cajoling, to the trauma of World War I and its chaotic aftermath. Mood shifts sharply, in this mixed media show, from praise and adolescent sexual excitement to a resigned bareness as the dark, yet sprightly atmosphere, dims, revealing its underlying misery, portrayed by disfigurement, rage, and a hopeless sunken-ness of faces and figures. In paintings and illustrations, hair thins and crooks, cut short in its wildness, as optimism flinches so decisively, and dismissively, that it dissolves for the duration of the movement.

Franz Marc’s pre-war woodcut, Fantastic Creature, from the illustrated book, The Blue Rider, gently persuades the viewer of the vitality of daydreams. A lean animal, yellow with grey stripes poses, its features flat and mellow. In the background, a rock draws the viewer’s attention with its height and color. The tone of red, along with its three green spots resemble a strawberry turned upside-down, with two green leaves growing out if its peak. The terrain lumps, wrinkly, like knuckles with a strong shadow adorning the upper crest. Its shade even resembles a pale skin. If it were not for the creature, the landscape would echo an underwater setting with its soft edges that hint at a slow delicate tide. The tenderness implies a welcoming of the imagination and of the pleasures of creativity. The stokes are smooth and without tension. Color is emphasized for its enjoyment. The lack of details suggests a meditation with space, even an allowance for investigation. The character of the piece is hopeful, even juvenile, in its ease.

In Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting Street, Berlin and Erich Heckel’s Franci, prostitutes take the foreground as models, but with hardly a distinction of their profession; it is the accompanying text from either museum or artist that clarifies the women’s social positions. This emphasis implies that a curiosity surrounding the taboo of their vocation still exists now as it did then, and that pointing it out will excite something forbidden in viewers, and will create an interest to see them as objects of beauty and desire.

While this elevation of infatuation stimulates viewers, the artists are cautious not to “prostitute” them. Eroticism is pushed aside to stress the tension between voyeurism and exhibitionism. Men look, and obviously the artists’ looked, and now we look at the intimate displays of sexual and social values. It is as if the artists want the viewers to ask themselves why they are attracted to the art; whether it is observational, lustful, empathetic, or out of disgust. They want the viewer to have to express something of themselves, something perhaps they did not realize. And this is the urge of Expressionism, a release (and perhaps relief) of unbearable emotions. It is mindfulness so tender, in its spectrum of enjoyment to melancholy, that it stings when kept silent.

No doubt a mind so sensitive could be crushed so brutally by war. The elongated eyes that restricted empathy and sadness, it seems, to a soft watery stare grow hard and alien in battle. The illustrations of Otto Dix depict shadowy heaps wearing gas masks, hands filled with grenades. Colorful swirls are substituted for dark ink blots, as if black blood forced out of arteries. Gestures are frozen in action. Slaughter rivets the viewer in this frightening series as bodies lose their vigor. Flesh becomes bone. Skin becomes uniforms and dirt, suggesting trenches running through each body. Things bloat. Eyes shrink. The images hardly encourage the viewer to think struggle, victory, or even a philosophy of death straying too far from a dull acceptance of its emptiness. All vibrations melt to slim shimmers.

George Grosz’s Explosion mixes the geometric slivers of Cubism with the bright hues of early Expressionism, as if straining for a balance between them. The affect is layered and overwhelming, mimicking the citizen’s scramble as all around them gleams fiery in a red brilliance the color of meat. Tall buildings and factories burst and topple. Bricks stop in mid-flight. Smokestacks billow like a canon’s fire. The source of light and darkness, cutting the cubist angles, come from the windows of burning buildings, drawing one’s fragmented focus from the people crammed into the canvas’s corner to the explosion itself, as if suggesting this mentality an outcome of war. What vibrant colors that were reserved for people pre-war, now enhance the dehumanization taking place. Detail is now allowed for industry and mayhem, while people are split and reduced to abstract.

The emphasis of business and economic interests intensifies as post-war art is used for rhetoric against both communists and capitalists. Often, capitalists are depicted as fat, dumb-witted, and sinister, while communism is portrayed as a vehicle of starvation and chaotic mob violence. Each side cries oppression, and each side shows skeletons and hangings as sad consequences for supporting the opposition. In one illustration, business men have picked up the guns of dead soldiers to continue the war in the streets. They huddle in a blown out bunker, like generals forced to fight alone at the end of a gruesome battle. The final mood is grim and satirical, as if each cruel joke had fought alongside each soldier, hardening to a near indifference on the front lines.

German Expression: Works From the Collection finishes its three month run at MoMA on July, 11. For more information and pictures of the work, go to http://www.moma.org/explore/collection/ge/index.

***

David Gibbs is a candidate for the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. His poetry has been published, or is forthcoming, in the Columbia Poetry Review, CutBank, Nimrod, and other journals. He is an editor at The New York Quarterly and the Graduate Coordinator of the Prison Writing Program at the PEN American Center. Additionally, between July and October, he will perform, alongside other artists, Roman Ondak’s performance art piece, Good Feelings in Good Times, at The New Museum. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Banksy or Bankboy?

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Once upon a long time ago humans made art so beautiful that it still speaks to us today. 35,000 years ago Upper Paleolithic people were adorning caves with their impressions of their world. Hertzog’s documentary “Cave of Lost Dreams” takes us deep inside, his commentary is thick with the sensation of being in the presence of those ancient people and it’s their art that brings them so powerfully to us. Expertly painted creatures run across the unhewn contours of the walls, a rockface covered in elegant hand prints sits alongside, a hanging outcrop is decorated with a vulva. From the multi-disciplinary study being undertaken in the Chauvet cave we learn that this was a ritual site that people continually visited for thousands of years. Other material evidence that comes to us from these people are the fragments of a small bone pipe, so if we know little else, we know they had art and music.

The Chauvet paintings show that our ancestors had anticipated the delights of moving pictures- many creatures are multi-legged which, analysts suggest, implied movement in the flicker of firelight. Carbon-dating reveals that the addition of a defining line to a brace of mountain lions occurred five thousand years after the original was drawn. It is no wonder that the researchers say that they dream vividly of wild animals –lions, real and painted and of the cave itself.

The development of human culture through the creative arts is an intriguing cipher: we look at the art throughout our history and the mindset of the time is revealed: religiosity, social conventions, apprehensions of beauty. As our cultures became more complex and class divisions codified our art changed too, it took on public and private forms and spoke to our different realities.

The art of western civilization has gamboled through many transitions in our few thousand years of documented existence and we set great value on this part of our material culture.

At an art opening a few weeks ago in a sleek well-appointed gallery, a woman came up to me as I was looking at an image projected on the wall, “Its crass” she announced squarely to stimulate some debate, I tried to throw her off with some unintelligible remark about Heidigger which made my friend’s husband snort at my bitchiness, but Madam misjudged me and was enthralled, she plied me with her business card and confided that she was a “high brow” investment collector from Sonoma.

I enjoyed the artists’ works in the show, but gallery settings are hard for me, the artworld vibe is difficult for me. I love art but my gut feeling is that art and money mix like oil and water: when fiscal value is invoked, commodity is created and the intangible magic of art begins to disappear.

It is not just that art is has become such a hot investment game, its very nature has become mega-loaded and difficult to define, especially as the last hundred or so years of art has taken so many forms and directions. The conceptual realizations of the last century have left` many feeling excluded, confused, outwitted and ultimately indifferent to art. The visual arts, superseded by film and encased in the business mechanism of the artworld no longer speak to all of us, it’s a privileged relationship mediated through education and wealth, cozy for insiders, bewildering and redundant for the uninitiated.

In 1917 when Marcel Duchamp gave up painting and exhibited Fountain, a readymade urinal, he scandalously proposed that everything can be art. Duchamp wasn’t the only intellectual that was challenging the perspective of art, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the Cubists (to name a few) were diversifying the forms of art to address the proliferation of cultural expression. This trend led through the last century and gave us a dizzying array of artistic forms and our appreciation was reflected in the price of ownership. Duchamp himself retired from being an artist early in life, and concentrated his creativity on chess, particularly the “endgame”. Chess, he said was better than art because it could not be commercialized. He did remain involved in the development of art though, advising gallerists and collectors and founding the Societe Anonyme in 1920 with Katherine Dreier and Man Ray to promote the public’s understanding of modern art.

Chances are, whether you are interested in art or not, that you’ve heard of Banksy: a street artist, a self-created brand, his career was not kick-started by a savvy art dealer nor endorsed by critics. His earliest works were made on public and private property in his hometown of Bristol, sometime later his work started to appear in London and from there to cities all over the world. Stencil artwork and written edicts, comments, jokes and anonymity have been his trademarks- cute rats, picturesque children and acute one-liners [“Watch out for the Crap!” on the steps of the Tate on the occasion of the 2002 Turner Prize].  Banksy’s stencil work is very nicely done and his messages are easy to understand, thus he has many fans, some of whom have a lot of money and pay artworld prices for his work. The work he continues to do on the street is free of charge and his legal identity remains under wraps.

Last year’s Exit Through the Gift Shop was Banksy’s first showing as a filmmaker and he didn’t disappoint; the story of Mr. Brainwash’s haphazard and meteoric rise shows how Banksy has busted the artworld’s cartel-style money-making scenario, and the luminous dealers and museum directors have been, as the kids say, molded.

Through the exuberant and irreverent creativity of Banksy and his compadres, Street Art, formerly known as graffiti, (around since there have been surfaces to adorn) has finally managed to kick the art establishment’s time-honored pre-digital control mechanism to the curb. Ever since the internet revolutionized our communicative abilities, street artworks, which used to suffer from a rapid onset of obscurity, due to generally being painted out in a matter of hours or days, now has an eternal home online and has consequently aggregated a massive audience.

Banksy, Shep Fairey, Faile, Nick X, Conor Harrington, Paul Insect and Escif, to name a few, fetch prices at auction that match and often outstrip the market value of artists who’ve ascended through the conventional gallery system.It seems that the blend of street art’s situationist flavor combined with a blatant disregard for establishment approval has won the hearts of the public.

Not everybody loves Banksy though, the only debate among serious art commentators is whether or not Banksy is an artist at all. I’m familiar with the flim-flammery of art establishment attitudes so this doesn’t surprise me:  I fully understand how the business of art defines and defends it’s pitch. An unholy triad decides what is and isn’t art, namely, art dealers (commercial gallerists), the intellectuals (art institution honchos and their representatives) and the collectors. What enters the annals of the history of art is endorsed by the approval of these groups: a dealer invests his money and reputation and gets behind an artist, the collectors buy the work and then somewhere down the line the institutional establishment shows them too. Often the institution and the dealers collude and the artist’s rise is all the more meteoric… Accordingly contemporary artists often reference this mechanism and other weirdness around originality etc with the art they make, and to understand what they’re trying to say you’d better have some grounding in philosophy and the history of art. If you’re interested and you have a bunch of cash (think hedge fund) an art dealer will befriend you and fill in the blanks, so you too can drink the wine and shoot the shit confidently down at the gallery.  It’s a business and a monopoly, and in my view, utterly not what art is about.

I’m disappointed that Banksy’s contribution is so slapped down and disregarded by the mainstream art press. Banksy is their elephant in the room, perhaps even their nemesis.  Nevertheless Banksy called it — he wanted to engage the artworld on their territory and did so when he moved  from illegal street art to illegal gallery display: having first focused on the general public who walk the streets in 2003 he turned to the perceived art audience with his crass placement of  “UK Crimewatch has Ruined the Countryside for All of Us” ( acrylic on canvas, 2003) in the Tate Gallery. Critics barricaded the doors against him, Jonathan Jones , art critter for The Guardian, full of bile, wrote a show-off article about how as one of the Turner Prize judges  he’d never nominate Banksy or any street artist, snottily he wrote:

“The reason I don’t like street art is that it’s not aesthetic, it’s social. To celebrate it is to celebrate ignorance, aggression, all the things our society excels at.”

I wonder if anybody called Jones out on that as he scoffed canapés and sucked down his wine at the Tate’s 2008 Street Art exhibit, which featured a wide selection of street art but notably not Banksy’s.  Lewisohn, the curator of that show on the exterior walls of the museum, weakly explained away Banksy’s absence saying that the audience was already well-acquainted with Banksy’s work and had sought to bring a selection of street art from other countries and cities into view. Maybe Banksy preferred to outshine the Tate show with his Cans Festival:  staged just before the opening of the Tate show, in an abandoned tunnel near Waterloo station, it featured the work of  30 street artists and was visited by 28,000 people in three days. Perhaps world’s most blatant anti-capitalist artist was flipping off the establishment endorsed show with it’s corporate sponsorship budget.

The blunt charge of anti-intellectualism which disbars Banksy from the elite ‘real art’ club is difficult to take seriously –- really? Banksy’s graffiti is inane but Emin’s sprawling signage “My Cunt is Wet with Fear” or Hirst’s spin paintings are somehow not? I predict that as Banksy’s work soars in value, establishment attitudes towards his artistic credibility will change. As Banksy has noted himself, “Galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires. The public never has any real say in what art they see.”

As the value of his work rises I predict that the artworld’s issues with his artistic credibility will continue to dissipate. Damien Hirst, currently the art establishment’s most canny moneyman, invested early in Banksy and has also collaborated with him on salable works. Soon enough one of those insider artworld outlets will bring Banksy into the fold and poor Jonathan Jones will have to figure out another way to get back onto the gallery supper A-list.

I liked Banksy straight away: irreverent and audacious on all appreciable levels, aesthetically pleasing and populist, (no need for a degree in the history of art to get Banksy’s message)  daringly  Situationist, (surprising peeps with art in their generally inane environment). He is bold and strangely modest in his anonymity, he comes across as a smart, anti-capitalist stoner type, I suspect he knows a lot about art history.

On good days I believe that Banksy really is fully inspired to liberate Art, the captive muse of capitalism. We have heard his art statement: art is everybody’s and you can say whatever you want, wherever you want. But does it ring true when your work is selling for megabucks in commercial galleries and auction houses?

On the one hand I understand that Banksy’s street art needs a considerable budget, beyond materials, the work’s execution has expenses which might run to: international flights and accommodations, assistants, cars, trucks, ladders, coffees, sandwiches and big bags of weed. Pricing a month-long trip to Palestine for three people, fifty thousand dollars seemed to be a reasonable estimate, this kind of cash must be coming from a steady stream of  artworld sales.  There is no crime in earning a living from art, Banksy’s official website states clearly that the artist is not represented by any gallery, galleries sell his work ‘second-hand’, inferring that the artist is just taking his cut. Well, kinda.

I see that he walks a fine line and that he is the fifth column in contemporary art.  While still putting art on the streets he also organizes exhibitions on his own terms  and accepts invitations from institutions where and when he pleases. The art that he embellished the segregation wall in Palestine shows me just how true his artistic aim is and his support, (moral and financial) of dissident street art groups, like the Russian group Voina, underlines his position.

Back in the Sixties Bruce Nauman made his spiral neon sculpture “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths” (neon, clear glass tubing suspension supports, 1967)  it’s a powerful piece, neon, at the time was used exclusively for  commercial displays, Nauman took neon and transplanted it into the territory of art and used it to remind us about the real message that artists try to impart.

For me the pudding-eating proof that Banksy is indeed a consummate artist is that he has given back a sense of self-determination to the viewer, breathing life into the  mystic truth of  an art environment where everybody is entitled to their opinion. It seems to me that in a decade or so, this shady figure has leveled the playing field and created a new agenda for art. When the conventional artworld stuck a player’s price tag on his work instead of fully capitulating to the establishment Banksy sidestepped to empower his  art paradigm.

One of my earliest memories is sitting on a little black toolbox in our garage, watching my Dad stone-carving. I was rapt as his chisel moved through the stone creating the whorl of a rose or the head of a lion. I knew the wonder of art as a child but when I was a curator and an art dealer I lost my connection to what art really meant to me.

Thanks to Banksy, the artist who dares to call the endgame moves on the artworld, I got it back.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DOROTHEA GROSSMAN

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THE TWO TIMES I LOVED YOU THE MOST IN A CAR
by Dorothea Grossman

It was your idea
to park and watch the elephants
swaying among the trees
like royalty
at that make-believe safari
near Laguna.
I didn’t know anything that big
could be so quiet.

And once, you stopped
on a dark desert road
to show me the stars
climbing over each other
riotously
like insects
like an orchestra
thrashing its way
through time itself
I never saw light that way
again.


(“The Two Times I Loved You the Most In A Car” previously appeared in Poetry Magazine and Askew Poetry, and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)


Dorothea Grossman: I have no bio for Dorothea Grossman, who is a bit of an enigma, but you can read an interview with her from Poetry Magazine here.

Editor’s Note: Some poems speak for themselves. And if the poet herself doesn’t need a bio, perhaps it’s evidence that this poem doesn’t need me to say much, if anything, on its behalf. I will say only that I love the simplicity, the way this poem evokes a kind of nostalgia that most everyone can relate to, and I must compliment the poet on a killer end line.

Want to read more by and about Dorothea Grossman?
Poetry Magazine
The Outlaw Poetry Network
Video: Dorothea Grossman and Michael Vlatkovich

“The Arizona Way or the American Way?” by Mark Budman

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Since I am a legal immigrant myself, I might understandably react to Arizona’s new law on immigration even more strongly than a native might. Though I am not a Latino, this issue of potential tough enforcement affects every immigrant group in America. After all, while the Latinos are the biggest slice of the immigrant community, other foreign nationals have settled in this country as well.

Quoting Arizona SENATE BILL 1070:

FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. THE PERSON’S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

As you can clearly see, this bill is not directed just against Latinos. And the last provision is the clincher. If they catch you on Friday night, you might spend the entire weekend in the slammer until the appropriate federal office is opened.

I wouldn’t like it if a cop stopped me in the mall and even took me to the police station after overhearing me speaking in my native language to my wife. However, I have to balance my desire for privacy with the need for security of my adopted country. I wouldn’t mind carrying my passport in my pocket to show it to law enforcement at a moment’s notice, although it’s both inconvenient and demeaning—if that would, for example, help to catch a member of a Russian or any Eastern European mafia. That would be, of course, if the Arizona law’s clincher were removed.

But I am not advocating a witch-hunt against immigrants, even if they are illegal. We can’t forget that America is both a humane and pragmatic country. We can’t corner people even if they have done something wrong, and yet we can’t condone criminal behavior. There should be a path to legality for all illegal immigrants, but it has to be a pragmatic and just one.

Some cost studies claim that illegal immigration costs U.S. taxpayers about $113 billion a year at the federal, state and local level. The bulk of the costs — some $84.2 billion — are absorbed by state and local governments.

So let’s make the illegals legal, then. Call it amnesty if you want. Call it what you want. Just give them a chance. But it should not be an entitlement. The following should be required of illegal immigrants to address the concerns of the Federal Government and local communities to make them legal:

1. Pay a fine for breaking the law—entering this country illegally. The fine should be sufficient to punish for breaking the law, but not so draconian as to cripple their finances.
2. Buy health insurance for themselves and their families.
3. Pay a special school tax, if they have school-age children, to cover the cost of second language teachers.
4. Submit to fingerprinting and other procedures for security purposes.
5. Learn English for quicker integration into the American society.
6. Be ready for immediate deportation if breaking other US laws.
7. And yes, carry Federal IDs.

Once they become legal, all restrictions should go away and the now lawful citizens should be embraced fully by society. A smart balance between the desires of the individual and the needs of the society is the path to truth and justice — and it’s not just the Arizonian, but the American way.

***

Mark Budman’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared or are about to appear in such magazines as Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, The London Magazine, McSweeney’s, Turnrow, Southeast Review, Mid-American Review, the W.W. Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of a flash fiction magazine Vestal Review. His novel My Life at First Try was published by Counterpoint Press to wide critical acclaim.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: OLIVER DE LA PAZ

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

INSOMNIA AS TRANSFIGURATION
by Oliver de la Paz

Because the night is a scattering of sounds—blunt
branches hurtling to the ground, a nest stir, a sigh
from someone beside me. Because I am awake
and know that I am not on fire. I am fine. It’s August.

The scar on my neck, clarity—two curtains sewn.
A little door locked from the inside.

Nothing wants anything tonight. There are only stars
and the usual animals. Only the fallen apple’s wine-red crush.

Rabbits hurtle through the dark. Little missiles.
Little fur blossoms hiding from owls. Nothing wants
to be in this galaxy anymore. Everything wants the afterlife.

Dear afterlife, my body is lopped off. My hands
are in the carport. My legs, in the river. My head, of course,
in the tree awaiting sunrise. It dreams it is the owl,
a dark-winged habit. Then, a rabbit’s dash
to the apple, shining like nebulae. Then the owl
scissoring the air. The heart pumps its box of inks.

The river’s auscultations keep pace
with my lungs. Blame the ear for its attention. Blame
the body for not wanting to let go, but once a thing moves
it can’t help it. There is only instinct, that living “yes.”


(“Insomnia as Transfiguration” was originally published in diode, and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)


Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2001, 2007), and Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press 2010), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martìn Espada. He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry. A recipient of a NYFA Fellowship Award and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust, his work has appeared in journals like The Southern Review Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. He teaches at Western Washington University.

Editor’s Note: “Because I am awake / and know that I am not on fire. I am fine. It’s August.” How could you not be blown away by a moment like that? Today’s poem is spotted with such moments, appearing between flashes of abstract images and ideas. “Nothing wants anything tonight… Nothing wants / to be in this galaxy anymore.” The idea of nothing being an entity of sorts, something capable of desire, is one such abstract idea, ever successful in its ability to get the reader’s mind to think outside the box.

Want to read more by and about Oliver de la Paz?
From the Fishouse
Guernica Mag
Linebreak
The Rumpus
Memali

The Coming Crisis of Op-Ed Food: Plenty of Plenty in the New Food Plutocracy

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

By Liam Hysjulien

[This piece was originally published in Truthout.]

As food prices, both in this country and abroad, continue their steady ascent, the amount we should pay for food remains a contested issue. In a February 21, 2011, Huffington Post article, Michelle Madden posits the question: Is food too cheap? While I commend Madden for brazenly tackling a difficult and heated subject, her conclusions suggest that our food-related problems are fundamentally issues of how we have come to value food and not in the food itself. Madden concludes that, “[w]e have driven costs so far out of the food system that in so doing we have not only driven down nutritional value, but driven out the notion of food being a precious resource.”[1] In this way, Madden seems to argue that the problems related to our poor diet, a trend I have described as a “caloric race to the bottom,” are the result of our inability to place adequate value on the precious commodity we call food. Following Madden’s logic, the consequence of having cheap food is that “we over-buy because it’s cheap and over-eat because we’ve bought it.”[2] But is that really always the case?

More recently, in a March 31, 2011, article, Francis Lam, senior writer at Salon, also raised the question of whether higher food prices are necessarily a bad thing. Instead of focusing, like Madden, on the way in which higher food prices can make food seem more valuable, Lam sees recent studies in the physiology of hunger as indicative of our biochemical drive to mindlessly consume food. For Lam, one way our biological impulse to overeat can be effectively countered is to provide less food in ostensibly the same size packaging. Lam concludes, “[w]e eat mindlessly, as a function of habit and instinct and so with a surplus of food, we are constantly overeating.”[3]

For both Lam and Madden, the argument over the positive effects that higher food prices can have on curbing our consumption of junk food is fraught with an overreliance on individual choice and a limited understanding of the structural inequalities plaguing our economic system. Both authors’ arguments remind me of a “smoke them out” approach – where higher food prices and smaller food quantities will serve as an impetus for changing people’s poor food choices. These arguments rest on the idea that since Americans spend a mere 10 percent of their income on food, the problem is one of priorities, not cost. Whether it’s the way in which lower prices devalue our food or a biological drive toward eating high-fat, high-sugar diets, these authors believe that higher food prices can have a positive effect on our eating habits.

Overall, the current food movement seems satisfied with the idea that having people spend more money on food, both in percentage of household budget and overall price of foodstuffs, will be a catalyst for improved diet and general well-being. While I am not denying that there is an argument to be made for higher food prices, I rarely, which is especially troubling in these painful economic times, see an adequate critique of class inequality and poverty enter into the food debate. While I read countless articles lamenting how much less Americans spend on food than Europeans, or debating whether food security is being measured properly, people in this country – and the rest of the world – are dealing with the brutal reality of higher costs of living and diminishing wages.

If we are going to be serious about addressing the problems of food in this country, we need to discuss class inequality, the stripping of social welfare programs and the erosion of a middle-class base. Food choices, especially the ones deemed poor or nutritionally low, are not only the byproducts of choice, but the realities of a society where growing inequalities have become coupled with limited upward mobility. When Madden writes, “America has always been the land of plenty, but we have plenty of plenty,” I wonder if we are both talking about the same country.

Americans have plenty of access to low-priced commodities, but – and this is especially apt when discussing cheap food – the plenty that we value bends considerably more toward cheap goods. And this is not merely Americans making poor food-purchasing choices, but, instead, the underlying reality of a market-based system predicated on low costs and declining wages. As Truthout contributor Dave Johnson remarks, we are living in a country where “[m]any people are finding it harder to just get by and stay even and expect that things will get worse for their kids.”[4] We are seeing the ramifications that emerge from a society wedded to the notion that growing inequality and cheapness at all cost is somehow economically viable. Americans could probably spend more money on food, learn how to grow their own food and strengthen family and community bonds through cooking and shared meals – all things I value in my own life – but where are the time and resources for such endeavors? Unless you are of that top 1 percent of earners benefiting from the last three decades of supply-side economics, you are engaged in financial self-survival – community-building through food be damned.

Are we really a society of plenty when real median income hasn’t changed over the last 14 years? And while we may spend less on food than people in other countries, we do spend considerably more on education and health care than our European counterparts. As a 2005 New Yorker article on the amount of hours that Americans work noted, “Americans spend more hours at the office than Europeans, they spend fewer hours on tasks in the home: things like cooking, cleaning and child care.”[5] In this era of fleeting job security and decreasing social safety nets, we work more, eat worse and socialize less. And obviously we have choices in all this – the poorness of our choices seem to be an emphasis of the current food movement – but the realities of slowing down, enjoying the simplicity of a home-cooked meal and eating more expensively now to save on future health care costs, run contrary to the values of our capitalist system.

As the social theorist Zgymunt Bauman once remarked, “all addictions are self-destructive; they destroy the possibility of ever being satisfied.”[6] Nowhere is the truth of this clearer than in our fragile system of cheap, plentiful food. We live in a society where advertisers spend billions of dollars a year to promote an ideology of fast, fun and affordable food – and it should be noted that a marginal proportion of advertising goes toward healthy food options. Even more revealing is research published in the Archives of General Psychiatry that explains how visual “food cues” (e.g. seeing an advertisement for a chocolate milkshake) can trigger responses in the brain similar to those found in drug addictions. As these relationships become better understood, the question of eating habits may shift away from rational choice explanations and instead toward food-related treatment programs.

The current food movement has succeeded in promoting a paradigm shift in the way we eat, grow and consume food, but a shallow understanding of class inequality does more harm than good for this nascent movement. If we stick to a perspective that food choices can be improved simply through higher prices or more public awareness, we are wedging a divide in a movement that should be predicated on inclusion for all. Market-based solutions cannot be the sole driving force in changing our eating habits. If economic inequality continues to grow and food-based welfare programs are cut to the bone, we will continue to see a caloric race to the bottom of cheaper food lead to an increasingly less healthy society. The culprits in our food crisis aren’t merely the juggernauts of Big Ag or the octopus-like fast food industry, but a system of structural inequalities that is drowning the poor and middle class.

Footnotes:

[1] Michelle Madden, “Is Our Food Too Cheap?” Huffington Post (February 21, 2011).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Francis Lam, “Is The Rise Of Food Prices All Bad?” Salon (March 31, 2011).

[4] Dave Johnson, “If You Are or Want to Be in the Middle Class,” Truthout (April 5, 2011).

[5] James Surowiecki, “No Work and No Play,” New Yorker (November 28, 2005).

[6] Zygmunt Bauman, “Liquid Modernity” 2001.

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Gary Johnson: Pro and Con

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Before I was a leftist, I was a libertarian. I voted for the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in my first three U.S. general elections—1988, 1992, and 1996—and in 2000, I voted for George W. Bush, one of only 18 people in my Chicago precinct to do so (let it never be said that I am afraid to throw away my franchise). The candidate George W. Bush whom I rather indifferently hoped to see win the election was, it seemed to me, an affable do-nothing doofus, an unassuming place-holder: the new century’s “Silent Cal” Coolidge (at best) or Warren G. Harding (at worst). I voted for the George W. Bush who claimed to advocate staying out of preventive wars and spending vast sums on nation-building. How hard could that be? I expected the rather dim and chronically underachieving Bush to expend the greater part of his energies just avoiding embarrassment—maintaining a low profile and keeping his dick in his pants, things the last guy had failed to do. Not a lot to ask, but this was really all I wanted from a President.

Of course this was before the Florida ballot imbroglio and Bush v. Gore; before 9/11 and the War on Terror and the USA PATRIOT Act; before Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib; and before the insane mortgage bond derivatives bubble almost broke the world economy. This laundry list of fateful world-historical events made me vow never again to vote for a Republican candidate for the highest office. But it was the last item that made me renounce the Libertarian Party and its fetish for free and unregulated markets, and reconsider Marx.

That is, until recently. I first heard of former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson’s Presidential campaign on Facebook, through a college friend who still waves the libertarian flag high. Though Johnson is running as a Republican, his platform issues—legalize marijuana and end the War on Drugs, streamline immigration, withdraw our forces from the Middle East and stop the corresponding offensive on civil liberties at home, provide strong tax incentives for businesses to stay in the U.S. and create new jobs—are all libertarian shibboleths (though Johnson prefers to call himself a “classical liberal,” which amounts to the same thing). Johnson is frequently compared to and seen as the heir apparent to Ron Paul, another libertarian who ran as a Republican candidate for President. In fact, Johnson is, if anything, more libertarian than Paul, whose anti-immigrant and pro-life views put him closer to old-school conservatism than libertarianism. In spite of his exclusion from a CNN debate among Republican candidates, Johnson possesses potential appeal with several disparate demographics, including Tea Partiers; Democrats, who made up some two-thirds of New Mexico’s electorate when he was governor of that state; younger voters, as evidenced by this favorable interview in Rolling Stone magazine; and business owners, enticed by Johnson’s advocacy of abolishing the corporate income tax.

So what’s my take on Johnson? Obviously, his stands on civil liberties, immigration, drug policy, and military issues are, if not perfectly aligned with the progressive line, as least the best that can be expected from a candidate who actually wants to win a primary election. His views on economic issues, however, cause me no small amount of trepidation. To understand why, we need to answer the question of why I disavowed libertarianism to begin with.

Two events that occurred between 2000 and 2002 deeply shook my faith in libertarian thought. First came the collapse of the dot-com bubble, the build-up to which I had witnessed in extreme close-up: from 1998 until 2000, I worked in the equity research department of an investment banking firm in Chicago which underwrote the initial public offerings of many tech and internet companies. The euphoria of those years was palpable; prudence and deliberation were put aside as share value (and thus the size of our commission and bonus checks) grew and the NASDAQ climbed. As the bubble burst and the bankruptcies began, the lesson I took away was: Contrary to libertarian economic theory, markets do not always behave rationally. When the Enron scandal broke the following year, it became abundantly clear to me that markets do not always operate honestly, transparently, and with society’s betterment in mind, either. As Enron employees lost their jobs and retirement savings, and shareholders watched stock prices plummet, I saw that the actions of a few greedy individuals could result in suffering for many thousands of unsuspecting “little people.”

Still, I clung doggedly to small-government, free-market doctrine for a number of years, despite my own desperate economic straits, which ironically resulted in my reliance on government assistance for several months. My final disillusionment came in 2007-2008, when I got a clerical job at a large law firm that represented numerous mortgage lending companies in civil complaints against defaulting homeowners—a “foreclosure mill.” Again, I saw firsthand—and even, to my shame, participated in—corporate greed, callousness, and duplicity, resulting once again in financial ruin for millions of ordinary people. Clearly, rich and powerful corporations, which I had believed to be noble, wealth- and job-creating entities that worked to counteract an inefficient and corrupt government bureaucracy, did not serve the best interests of society, or of anyone besides their officers and shareholders. They wreaked havoc on the global economy, the lives of their workers, and the environment. Government oversight, which I had thought of as a needless constraint on the Creative Force of the Marketplace, was indeed necessary to protect the public from plunder.

It is curious to me that the philosophical axiom underpinning much libertarian thought is the Panglossian notion, dating back to Adam Smith, that every actor in the Market behaves rationally and according to his own interests, but the Market as a whole serves the common good. (This idea is rapidly losing market share among modern economists, who integrate financial history with the findings of modern psychology, sociology, and even biology to develop more realistic models of economic behavior.) Since all economic players act selfishly but rationally, and the net result of their actions is the betterment of society as a whole, it is to everyone’s benefit to give every individual maximum freedom and minimal restraint, as long as his actions directly harm no one else. Regulation is unnecessary because, given rational producers and rational, self-interested consumers, market forces will reward the conscientious and discourage or punish the unethical. Hence the emphasis on personal liberty, and the distrust of government interference with markets (or government anything, for that matter).

So that’s my story, plus a vastly oversimplified thumbnail sketch of the theoretical basis of libertarianism. But getting back to Gary Johnson and the real world, in which political quid pro quo and compromise always trump political theory. Political candidates have lots of grand ideas and say lots of things to get elected, only some of them true or relevant. What candidate would I back in the 2012 election?

Given the readership of this website, I doubt I need to say anything about the rest of the Republican field—I would sooner vote for a dead cat. The real choice for me (excluding a third-party candidate) is between Gary Johnson and the Democratic incumbent, Barack Obama. And the only reason I’m even pressed to make a choice, given that the incumbent is supposedly “one of ours,” is Obama’s execrable performance in his first term. He simply has not delivered as promised, in terms of either advancing a progressive agenda (he has behaved as a de facto stealth Republican), or, really, of getting much accomplished at all.

So—Gary Johnson: selected pros and cons.

Pros:

  • Committed to civil liberties; favors an end to the War on Drugs and the surveillance and unlawful detention practices of the security state. This needs no elaboration, save to note that none of this police-state business has decreased even slightly under Obama, in spite of his campaign promises.
  • Committed to ending foreign military interventions and “nation-building,” with a concomitant decrease in defense spending and foreign aid. Huzzah!
  •  Supports an easier, more streamlined immigration process and a decrease in ineffectual border fences and patrols. Every candidate makes noises about immigration reform. Johnson, with his experience as the governor of a border state, believes, correctly, that (a) ending the Drug War will ameliorate much of the criminal cross-border activity; and (b) a more amenable visa process for those foreign nationals who work and go to school here is to everyone’s benefit, and would encourage those who receive their higher education in the U.S. to stay here and contribute to our economy. Being treated in good faith by the government, rather than with suspicion, would make foreign workers and students want to reciprocate and play by the rules themselves. Nobody wants to be an outlaw. They want a better life.
  • Supports domestic development of high-tech research and manufacturing. Encouraging foreign students to stay here and work is a part of this.

Cons:

  • Pro-business, to an almost monomaniacal degree. From Johnson’s campaign website: “Reject auto and banking bailouts, state bailouts, corporate welfare, cap-and-trade, card check, and the mountain of regulation that protects special interests rather than benefiting consumers or the economy.” It’s not the rejecting corporate welfare and bailouts part that concerns me, or even the rejection of cap-and-trade (which I think is a rather dubious proposition in any case); the parts about card check and the “mountain of regulation” that benefits “special interests,” however, sets off alarm bells. Labor is a “special interest,” unworthy of the protections a union affords? Hmm. And exactly what fiefdom on the “mountain of regulation” should we get rid of first? The EPA? The FDA? The USDA? The SEC? None of these institutions has ever worked perfectly—although that’s mostly because of the influence of big business—but they’re the main obstacles to a total rape of the environment, unsafe food and drugs, pillaging mortgage companies, et cetera. Or maybe consumers are unworthy of these protections? In an interview, Johnson claims that a clean environment and safe food are beneficial to everyone, and thus corporations should voluntarily work toward these ends—the magical power of the Marketplace. I say: As if. The last I checked, a decade of steady government deregulation and “voluntary self-enforcement” in the financial services industry was the catalyst that led to the mortgage meltdown, which—I’ll say it again—nearly broke the global economy. Similarly, an early twentieth-century meatpacking industry that produced tainted food and a manufacturing industry that polluted the water and air had to be reined in by increased government regulation. Corporate self-regulation has proven again and again to be a bad joke.
  • Opposes clean energy. Or rather, supports business as usual, only with even more freedom for corporations to exploit the environment looking for fossil fuels, which amounts to the same thing. Apparently Johnson isn’t convinced that all his proposed promotion of high tech will lead to any serious developments in viable alternative energy sources.
  • Favors privatization of many government-owned and/or operated enterprises. This always sounds like such a great idea at first look, but, as the cities of Chicago and Indianapolis have discovered by privatizing their municipal parking authorities (for example), what seems like a great way to generate a windfall for a city in the short-term often turns into a long-term fiduciary loss, not to mention a source of endless headaches for the consumers of the privatized services. And on the state level, the trendy selling off or leasing for quick cash of actual infrastructure—turnpikes, toll bridges, ports—usually to foreign investors, can’t be a good idea.
  • Fetishistically obsessed with balancing the federal budget—immediately; favors radical restructuring of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. It’s not exactly visionary to observe that the federal deficit is disturbingly large, to the extent that it’s jeopardizing the financial security of the entire country for generations. Nor is it terribly astute to claim that our system of entitlements for the elderly is broken and needs to be rethought. But by radically restructuring Johnson means “reduce spending on by 43%—Johnson is always eerily precise with this 43%; it’s meant to reflect that 43 cents of every budget dollar goes to servicing the national debt—so that the budget will be balanced right after I take office.” The budgets he plans to drastically cut include a few that I applaud: the military, the homeland security apparatus, drug and border enforcement. But there’s also a lot that would be extremely painful to many who have already suffered plenty because of the limping economy, i.e., children, the elderly, the sick, the needy—those already deep in debt and sinking fast.

And they call progressives “radical.”

There are, of course, other issues, such as education, where I applaud Johnson’s goals but question his planned means of achieving them (the answer is always—wait for it—privatization).

My (obvious) question in the face of all this sudden reform is, “Why doesn’t anybody want to implement these painful austerity measures when times are good and people can afford a little belt-tightening?” To which the (equally obvious) answer is, “Because it doesn’t seem necessary then.” It hardly seems fair to kick the underclass when they’re down, after they’ve already endured five years of economic hardship.

I am relieved and immensely gratified to see that we have a candidate running on a major party ticket who takes ideas like these seriously, and who seems to have the backbone to fight for them (although I thought the same about Mr. Obama). It is clear that hard choices need to be made, and the current crop of politicos is not up to the challenge of making them. But it is also clear that, in spite of my strong and deeply-held commitment to civil liberties, to a saner approach to drug and immigration policy, and to an end to interventionism and “wars of choice,” I find it terribly difficult to support these at the expense of condemning the increasingly invisible American underclass to more pain and neglect.

We will learn much in the coming months as the fruits of austerity measures become known in Europe, particularly Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. As I write, Greece especially seems to be barely holding at a simmer, waiting for the slightest further provocation to explode into more and deeper civil unrest.

Much also depends on what kind of Congress we see coming in with the 2012 election. Will the Tea Party gain ground again? If the circumstances are such that Gary Johnson has any hope of winning the nomination and the general election, I think we have to assume that this will be the case. Do we really want to hand total control of the government to a Republican majority heavily weighted with budget-slashing Tea Party- and libertarian-influenced members? Would our social fabric hold under the strain of such rapid enactment of reforms? And, more importantly, what real evidence is there that austerity and budget cuts are a helpful response to a struggling economy? History suggests that such a reaction may be counterproductive as well as unpopular and cruel. Just because the medicine tastes bad doesn’t necessarily mean it works.

So who am I going to vote for? Mmm, I’m thinking this guy.