Stump Lane
in the dirt since history began

[Cross posted at Reading the Spectacle]

“Did you see Idol last night?” … “Can you believe the Pats went for it on 4th and 2?” … “It turns out Lost jumped the shark in season one, but none of us noticed!” … Small talk and Monday morning quaterbacking around the water cooler are hardly human interaction. Although an utterance of, “There was nothing good on TV last night so I read this book in which the author says we no longer directly live, but experience a false representation of life through an endless succession of spectacles,” might be met with a slightly more authentic form of human contact: the blank stare.*

“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”

* The Blank Stare, once the weapon of sardons and malcontented comedians, (see: Bill Hicks,) has matriculated into common use and been commodified by the spectacle to punctuate and soften irony. A goofy “just kidding!” sung after every “insult,” (see: Jon Stewart.)

SAW THIS STUFF ONCE on one of those travel cooking shows. Based on the quick description given on the show and consulting several online recipes, I set about making a holiday side dish.

“Charquican”

1/2 lb potatoes peeled and cut into chunks
1/2 lb pumpkin de-seeded, peeled and cut into chunks
1 good sized carrot peeled and cut into chunks
chicken broth

1 cup of meat (omit for side-dish)
1 onion chopped
1/2 bell pepper chopped
1 or 2 Serrano peppers chopped small, practically minced
spinach
1/2 cup corn
1 clove garlic minced
olive oil

parsley
cumin
pepper
oregano
salt

Boil potatoes, pumpkin and carrot in broth until tender, drain broth and mash.
Saute the remaining ingredients in oil, season to taste and simmer.
Combine the two parts together and mix.

[Cross-posted at Reading the Spectacle]

This child is not making a soccer ball for himself. He is making a commodity of a thousand soccer balls. Somewhere along the line he may have the opportunity to own or play with one of these balls, but he only benefits from a very small portion of the value of his surplus production. Most of these soccer balls will be utilized by the children of other alienated workers in far away lands.

“[A]lienated consumption has become just as much a duty for the masses as alienated production. The society’s entire sold labor has become a total commodity whose constant turnover must be maintained at all cost. To accomplish this, this total commodity has to be returned in fragmented form to fragmented individuals who are completely cut off from the overall operation of the productive forces.”

CBS NEWS WARNED US on 60 Minutes this past Sunday, about certain costs among the health care costs “that threaten to bankrupt the country”:

Last year, Medicare paid $50 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients’ lives – that’s more than the budget of the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Education.

And it has been estimated that 20 to 30 percent of these medical expenditures may have had no meaningful impact. Most of the bills are paid for by the federal government with few or no questions asked. [60 Minutes]

We’ve spent $935 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 and they don’t even seem to be on the radar screen in terms of threatening to bankrupt the country.

Some quick math:

• Roughly 2.5 million people die in US in a year. At $50 billion, that’s $20,000 per dead person.
• At least 753,399 people have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. At $935 billion, that’s $1.2 million per dead person.

Obviously, some methods of ushering folks into the afterlife are more efficient than others.

And the above war spending figures are just the emergency war supplemental funding. Consider:

For the 2009 fiscal year, the base budget of the Department of Defense rose to $518.3 billion. Adding emergency discretionary spending, supplemental spending, and stimulus spending brings the sum to $651.2 billion. Defense-related expenditures outside of the Department of Defense constitute between $274 billion and $493 billion in additional spending, bringing the total for defense spending to between $925 billion and $1.14 trillion in 2009. [Wikipedia]

$1 trillion dollars, a single year of military spending, is enough money to cover US end of life medical treatment for 20 years!

But seriously, this next bit is for the reflexive, small government Republican rank-and-file types. If you simultaneously say, “Rah-rah! Yes, we must go to war to preserve our way of life,” while criticizing Big Government “entitlement” spending on things like health care, housing, and so forth, it seems like you’re saying, “spare no expense to kill foreigners,” while you begrudge lifting a finger to help your own countrymen get along when they fall on bad times, or even to die on their own terms.

Anarchists and small government conservatives should be on the same page, to some extent, with regard to the state, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. The difference is a matter of priorities. That, and somebody’s not being consistent. Somebody’s going to have to give up on their illusions and love of the Daddy State’s massive military/police/prison system, before their general state of panic over entitlement spending can be taken seriously.

Cutting “entitlements” by itself does not move us towards a more perfect society. Though the perfection of society would obviate the need for “entitlements.”

[Cross posted. Check out Reading the Spectacle]

Home buyers expect an updated kitchen with stainless steel appliances and granite counter tops. And a master suite with plenty of space. And a tiled bathroom. And don’t cheap out on the fixtures!

“The spectacle … is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production.”

Books that Changed Me: The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord.

Voices From The Grave! Guy Debord changed my life. Well, he at least provided a framework and language to think about certain truths I’d had some nagging sense of, yet until now, would have struggled to express. Though the edition pictured above is the book I read, for cutting and pasting purposes, the excerpts in the article below come from a different translation that I found online.

WHAT IS the spectacle? Debord puts forth the proposition that we people of the modern age do not directly live, but rather experience a representation of life through an endless succession of spectacles.

In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. [Debord, #6]

That sense of dissonance we experience, in quiet moments of clarity, between the world we plainly perceive, and the world as it is presented to us, is born of our alienation from an unreal version of ourselves which is a construct of our all-too-real societal (spectacular) institutions.

Spectacular society is uncompromisingly divided into a small elite ruling class and everybody else, whose value stems from their productivity. The spectacle’s greatest strength is in it’s ability to create and perpetuate an image, an alternate version, representing the “truth” of these opposing classes.

Wait, when the fuck did all of this happen?

The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle’s domination: the representation of the working class has become an enemy of the working class. [Debord, #100]

This representation of the working class is still at work today. It could be witnessed recently, when we saw the vilification of autoworkers as they made efforts to ensure the pensions and retirement health benefits owed them as a term of their employment would continue to be honored, even as the auto companies were facing bankruptcy. It can be seen in the vilification of migrant workers, even as they harvest our food! It cannot be said that that work isn’t valuable to society, but these are some of the most hated people in this country.

This sort of domination through false representation and alienation isn’t limited to workers. The portrayal of women, minorities, young people, the handicapped, in no way reflects the true nature of particular individuals or their aspirations. The spectacle thrives by creating these groups and categorizing people by association, and then championing or dispatching whatever group’s concerns as determined by political utility.

The spectacle is a potent servant of power.

Debord’s chapter 6, Spectacular Time is one that really sings. Especially to one experiencing the constant sense of loss brought on by an obsessive preoccupation with the inexorable passage of time. (more…)

WE’VE GOT a couple irons in the fire in terms of posts for this here blog. However, lazy.

Here is a song for Thursday night and into Friday.

Fifty Foot Hose, Red the Sign Post

“Hey, is that you?”

“No.”

IN BANKING THERE’S SOMETHING called the “Texas Ratio.” It is essentially the number you come up with when you divide a bank’s bad assets by the stuff it has that is actually worth something. The higher the Texas Ratio is the worse the situation the bank is in, the more likely the bank will fail.

The hilarious aspect of Texas Ratios is that the top number, the bad stuff, “is subjective.” After all, you only have the bank’s word on what number to plug in up there.

…it is possible for a bank to be too honest. If they report tons of bad loans and rack up a high score, their Texas Ratio could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. [Marketplace]

Because if a bank is “too honest,” customers and investors might be hesitant to put their money on the line with them.

Our financial system might be a precarious house of cards, but positive thinking surely counts for something, right?