Malaise and melancholy

Mexican scrappers and scroungers chatter on the corner, bungee-wrapped duffels and derelict shopping carts in tow.

El viento del norte fuerte y muerde el asfalto de esta tierra se traga el viajero extraviado.

Chinese office-workers with grocery bags retire to their condos, the wrought-iron gate clanging behind them.

The two-tone chime signals the closing doors of the N train and with a low angry boom under the overpass, the steel convoy serpentines its way through the dark wooded path to the next station.

Tired salarymen and women emerge from the pockmarked turnstile house that is the Fort Hamilton station, walls spackled with flea market flyers and lost pet notices.

I join one of the clusters of homebound commuters headed for the Scaturro’s supermarket, calling out orders to the deli counter guys, provisions and foodstuffs for the cold, damp weekend.

This malaise and melancholy this week has taken from me that sense of anticipation and energy for the coming weekend.

Instead I long for window shutters to close and a quiet fireplace to sit in front of, perhaps a subconscious artifact of a Norman Rockwellesque, New England shire at Christmastide, rustic and bucolic, of mahogany tones and hand forged iron.

No more history books or magazines or newspapers. No more television. No more Internet. No more foreign relations studies. No more DHS reports. No more police scanner. No Electric Age extensions of the central nervous system to connect my Faustian mind to the deteriorating world.

Again Camille Paglia, will you marry me?

"What you have described is the Orc-Urizen cycle, a pattern identified by the great Romantic poet and visionary artist William Blake after the French revolution. Blake saw every radical impulse toward freedom eventually ossifying and turning back on itself in a new oppression and tyranny. You are quite right to detect adolescent naiveté in many demands of white middle-class young people in the 1960s. We had been overprotected by our parents, who had suffered Depression and war for most of their lives and were determined to give us something better. Unfortunately, the result of this well-intended paternalism was a cultural banality and stifling conformism that the '60s tried to destroy by any means necessary. But it is still puzzling why that dissident generation so enamored of freedom would have drifted toward today's speech codes, thought control and ideological intolerance."

O Camille, Camille, my razor-tongued Italiana
my femme-de-lettres, how sharp thy mind
thy string of thoughts, fierce and terse
speak what tomes attempt with ten-fold in verse
Alas another woman be thy choice
Will thou not chance a stricken suitor's voice?
What rough tempest must I sail,
what iced peak must I scale,
what foul horde must I fight,
to win thy star most brightest in the night
Why o why o'er Camille must I obsess,
my unattainable Ayn Randian heroine, my Camille.

I'm old, gimme, gimme, gimme!

Graying democratic societies implies an irrevocable socialist policy trajectory – even the most obnoxious heckler at the recent Obamacare townhall meetings accepts Social Security as a fact of life and in no way considers it socialism. Everything is socialist until one gets a monthly check. What about the GOP alternative to Social Security? A partially securitized option? Subject to the same bubbles that brought down Lehman and Bear Stearns?

Neither the Republicans or Libertarians can answer the question of long-term care. Therefore I think the political solution to entitlement programs is unattainable. It is impossible to convince someone to give up their monthly check. Democracy in this case may enable a feedback loop that makes reform impossible; a perfect storm of AARP pressure and mutual loathing within each political party to touch that third rail.

The solution maybe to divest the federal government out of Social Security obligations by passively bringing about the total collapse of the system and then declaring a state of emergency to circumvent the subsequent public outcry.

I forsee global finance decamping out of graying nations to move operations to the tax and legal regimes of younger nations, nations without FMLA, SS, Medicare, EPA, NLRB, EEOC, etc. The remnants would be bankrupt, holding securities, bonds and 401ks about as worthless as 19th century mining scrip; starving, left to the rule of whatever petty neo-feudal order that takes control of America’s dwindling resources.

I'm not opposed to old age insurance per se, but it should be reserved for veterans, teachers and cops/firemen (like the vote IMHO). There is a cultural taboo in the urban US regarding living with one's parents, a product perhaps of Weber's Protestant ethic. In the days of $1/gallon oil and 6% annual growth, one could afford to go it alone or with a roomie.

Chinese families use parents as a free babysitting and cooking service for grandkids, a built-in social safety net that does not rely on daycare centers, allowing for a more efficient sharing of costs and a higher than average savings rate (also fueled by the elderly generations' collective memories of forced labor and starvation in the days of Mao). Thus, the dearth of banks along 8th Avenue and thus the Asian appetite for non-security, non-debt instruments that leave banks scrambling for investment vehicles with enough return on investment to meet reserve requirements, therefore, the overvalued price for land, gold and oil.

Healthcare debate

The cost of medical care has to deflate like 90%. Why should we need insurance anyway? Sorry. The hospitals have to eat it, the doctors have to eat it, the lawyers have to eat it (tort reform), the illegals have to eat it. Put all prices of surgical procedures, diagnostics, hospital stays on the web like Travelocity and Priceline. Race to the bottom. Why not buy pharmaceticals from other countries? One is free to travel and engage in commerce right? Sure, we'll let illegals into the Emergency Room, but they will get fingerprinted and tracked by creditors.

Why charge $150 for a blood test when a little disposable plastic device can run 200 tests with a single drop of blood? The miracle of nano-technology. Destructive creation: Decimating the diagnostic industry to bring cheap home test kits to the public. Why not?

Why treat smokers and drug addicts at all? They made their choice. The earlier their deaths, the more solvent Social Security becomes.

And why limit pharmaceuticals with the FDA? Allow the untested stuff into the market. Let the public know that it's untested and let them decide. And insurance companies should be free to drop anyone crazy enough to try the untested stuff. And why have mandatory licensing for doctors? Let the unlicensed ones operate too, and let the consumer decide on the level risk they're willing to take.

Otherwise electronic capital will electronically beam itself out of a graying United States and into countries without our tax and legal regime burdened with massively inflated entitlements. Even the young people will vote with their feet and emigrate to greener pastures.

http://www.healthcarebluebook.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_prices#Price_transparency_issues

Books III

Maybe I haven't been to the right places, but it seems to me that Chinese bookstores are filled with Chinese literature and rarely translations of non-Chinese works, not because they are censored but because maybe there is not a large enough market to make it worthwhile for publishers to stock the shelves. Who knows, maybe the modern Chinese reading audience, like many descendants of ancient cultures with a collective memory of past greatness, can't stand modernity and want to escape into a more idyllic past, where hindsight provides a sense of reassurance instead of the frightening unknown of the century ahead.

There is still a large enough print market in the US where books like John Adams stays at the top of the Bestseller List for months. Obama's books, whether or not you agree with his ideology, reinforces the CIVIC CULTURE of community politics and discourse. But Chinese in general do not want to cause a ruckus, to rock the boat. Demonstrators or protestors, no matter how just the cause, are seen as trouble-makers. The bomber-jacket-wearing Lincolnesque Joe Six-pack in the Norman Rockwell painting who stands up in a townhall meeting to speak his mind is seen in Chinese eyes as a neer-do-well who should go with the flow and not bring trouble to our small town.

Chinese Central Television usually likes to air the parliamentary brawls in Taipei, to demonstrate how dangerous and chaotic democracy is. Perhaps CCTV would also like to air the riots of construction workers whose fly-by-night employers with close friends in the Chinese Communist Party left them without months in back-pay? Perhaps CCTV would like to air but five minutes of the Taiwanese political talk shows (complete with hunch-backed, Larry-King-brand suspender-wearing hosts)?

Perhaps if the works of American union organizers and European anarchist agitators were translated into Mandarin? I respect the work of Mormon missionaries who speak FLUENT Chinese and preach the good word in China, but I think it would better serve the working class Han if translated copies of US Army Technical Manual TM-31-210 were passed around, to give a voice to People whom the Party is supposed to represent, but I digress.

Books II

I noticed as an adolescent that whenever I visited the home of an American friend, the shelves were filled with current affairs books, the tables stacked with National Geographic, Time and Newsweek. When I visited the home of Chinese friends, the bookshelves were full of VHS tapes of Chinese soap operas and pop music concerts. It seemed to me that only books were the textbooks from school. Granted that my Chinese friends were of first-generation working class families of modest means who focused on the practical subjects upon which to attain college and a career, and my Irish, Italian, Greek and Polish American friends came from the more middle-class families of Bay Ridge. One class seeks escape from the daily grind while the other sought the authenticity of other social realities.

And granted that many Americans today mostly read Stephen King or Danielle Steele while they're not watching Desperate Housewives or American Idol. Yes, within both peoples are majorities who prefer to ignore l’affaires d’etat and numb their minds with electronic entertainment (I myself am guilty of playing Rainbow Six for hours on end)

But keeping up on current affairs and politics is cultural survival. English literates have access to translations of ancient texts from every culture. We can learn lessons from the achievements and mistakes of others. To suggest that one’s culture has learned all there is to know is the height of arrogance, when we’re at the edge of the Transhumanist Epoch.

Will the Chinese every learn from the speeches of Livy? Will the Arabs every learn from Thucydides? Will the Russians ever learn from John Locke? Note that I exclude the Indians, because India is arguably the largest English-speaking country in the world and have a robust tradition of scholarship in both science and the humanities.

Thank god I speak and read English. Thank you, Mrs. Weinstein, in the 3rd grade, for patiently giving me this gift of English literacy, a most precious key which has unlocked a thousand doors into a thousand worlds. Paradise Lost. The Divine Comedy. Don Quixote. Romeo and Juliet. Anna Karenna. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Great Gatsby. Catcher in the Rye. Atlas Shrugged. On the Road.

Tech-schmech

Yes, yes, the Chinese developed gunpowder, but what did we do with it? Goddamned fireworks to entertain the peasants! It was the European metallurgist and guildsman who adapted gunpowder to shoot bullets at motherfuckers. The Han didn't catch on until we were dominated by the Manchus who had no qualms about using cannons.

The Chinese developed the compass, but what did we do with it? Sailed the world to arrogantly show the “foreign barbarians” our inherent superiority, with absolutely no curiosity for other cultures. Someone showed the Japanese how a steam engine worked in the 1850s and in less than a decade, they sailed their own steamship into San Franscisco.

Even in Chinese landscape painting, as wonderful as it is, the mountains and rivers predominate, rarely the ocean with its horizon line. Contrast that to the seascapes of JMW Turner, and vast blue yonder of promise and peril.

During the escalating tension between Chinese society and the colonial presence. The Emperor of China thought these big-nosed, round-eyed Lo Fan were just another foreign barbarian tribe like the Mongols who could be "managed" and kept at bay with wheeling and dealing. When British Ambassador MacCartney entered China with gifts of European technology in 1793, the Qiang-Lung Emperor said China has no use for such gadgets. Instead, this punk-ass bitch should have said: How many tons of silver would your technical professionals like to come teach in our schools?

Maybe open minds and open markets would've allowed the Qing Dynasty to prevent the Opium Wars, the Tai Ping Rebellion and subsequently the events that lead to the Boxer Rebellion and the Imperial Japanese occupation. But no, the Han were too set in our ways. Martial arts have worked for us for five thousands years! No need to worry about motherfuckers with Enfield rifles because we could make our own! (It's the NRA in my blood)