The Shadow of Wealth

Posted on by kay

Sex used to be the most difficult topic for people to speak candidly about. 

But ask any analyst working today, and they'll tell you that, nope, talking about sex comes easy these days. Now, the most difficult topic for people to be perfectly candid about is money. Personal finances. Whether you can actully afford your boat, or whether you're slowly sinking under the weight of the debt required to keep your boat afloat.

It's not a new flaw. What was Vanity Fair about? Or Oblonsky's character in Anna Karenina?  Or The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton? Plenty of the classics deal with those who simply cannot imagine living without a great deal of wealth at their disposal.

"Lydgate was now experiencing something worse than a simple deficit: he was assailed by the vulgar hateful trials of a man who has bought and used a great many things which might have been done without, and which he is unable to pay for, though the demand for payment has become pressing… Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything — nothing else 'answered'; and Lydgate supposed that 'if things were done at all, they must be done properly' — he did not see how they were to live otherwise."  –from Middlemarch, by George Eliot

And these folks did not have access to credit cards, poor dears. Just imagine how much trouble Rosamond and Tertius could have gotten into with 8 or 9 credit cards at 13.99% interest!

The shadow of the USA's vast wealth can be seen most clearly in how broke and strapped and overextended its citizens feel about money. Because most of what we "have" isn't paid for. We call it "ours," as in "our house," but it really belongs to a bank that would not hesitate to take it away from us should we miss a few payments. Which ties our homes and possessions and the very stability of our families to jobs we probably don't like, but don't feel we can afford to lose — even when those jobs are soul-killing. (No wonder zombie movies are so popular. I love that scene in Shaun of the Dead where it takes him awhile to notice the zombie invasion because that's how people usually look in the mornings.) How has it happened in the country which thinks of itself as the richest in the world, that 2 adults have to work for someone else 5 days a week in order to support 1 infant? Are things that much more expensive these days? Yes they are. And do we think we need more of them? Yes we do.  

Even our politicians obsess about debt. Especially our politicians obsess about debt. Deficits. With the party that spends the most when in office always calling the other party to task for poor management, naturally. And neither party making much headway against it. 

Debt: it's the shadow of wealth.

 

 

Eric Schlosser Nails It Again

Posted on by kay

Some people really do know how to make a difference in their culture. And one of them is Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, 2001; Reefer Madness, 2003).

The September 30th issue of The New Yorker has an in-depth review by Louis Menaud of Schlosser's newest book, Command and Control. Here's a quote from that review:

"…an excellent journalistic investigation of the efforts since the first atomic bomb was exploded, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, to put some kind of harness on nuclear weaponry. By a miracle of information management, Schlosser has synthesized a huge archive of material, including government reports, scientific papers, and a substantial historical and polemical literature on nukes, and transformed it into a crisp narrative covering more than fifty years of scientific and political change. And he has interwoven that narrative with a hair-raising, minute-by-minute account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in 1980, which he renders in the manner of a techno-thriller…

…Command and Control is how non-fiction should be written."

And once again for Schlosser, written about something we all should know.

Kudos to Eric Schlosser for the new book, and kudos to Louis Menaud for a wonderfully written, in-depth review. I highly recommend both.

 

 

 

 

 

Wisps in the wind

Posted on by kay

"Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

On the tiger no responsibility rests. We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life–he is born into their keeping and without thought he is protected.

We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free-will, his free-will not sufficiently developed to afford him perfect guidance…

As a beast, the forces of life aligned him with them; as a man, he has not yet wholly learned to align himself with the forces."

–Theodore Dreiser, in Sister Carrie

I’m afraid Icarus is driving

Posted on by kay

"Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The archetypes are the great decisive forces. They bring about the real events, not our personal reasoning and practical intellect… –CG Jung

 

OK, that's arguable. Because, as usual, Jung was saying something intiutive rather than something statistically provable.

But if we cede him the format — that certain instinctual forces drive humanity as a whole, from the inside out — and if we look at our own little slice of history that way, as a mere ripple in the great current of humanity occurring on this planet, then what would be the driving archetypal images of our time?

The first one that comes to mind is hubris. The pride that goes before the fall. The idea that whatever you think of can be (or even should be) done.

Then of course there are aggressive images.

Represented by the beasts, the monsters, the ogres, the tyrants in our tales…

And finally, there's greed: that ole dragon of capitalism, lurking and lying in wait within us all.

Nothing pessimistic about me.

 

 

Prejudices

Posted on by kay

I'm still on George Eliot, here. Because her insights are so right on. Because she was frackin' brilliant.

How brilliant? Mary Anne Evans, aka George Eliot, was a wildly successful female novelist from her very first published novel, Adam Bede… in the Victorian Age.

Despite living openly with a man who happened to be married to someone else, Eliot held a weekly salon attended by England's best and brightest lights. She counted that epitome of moral rectitude, Queen Victoria herself, among her most ardent fans.

When you can even get those who disapprove of you to approve of your work?… that's brilliance, folks.

Here's what Eliot has to say about prejudices:

 

"To minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity — strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others — prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth.

Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye — however it may come — these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up that void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton."          –George Eliot, from The Mill on the Floss

 

Interesting that she links those who tend to be severe, and those who have a vacuum in the spontaneous ideas department, with those who tend to form prejudices.

Gives us a better grasp on the handle of human nature.

The Problem with Free Will

Posted on by kay

The mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. –George Eliot, in Middlemarch

the possibility of balance

Posted on by kay

"There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I'll not live to see the meek inherit anything. What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That's pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There's the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace." — Leah Price speaking, from The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

 

Do not take the shadow lightly.

Posted on by kay

My husband came up with a catchy phrase today:

Do not take the shadow lightly.

Shadow, light… lightly, as in underestimating…

that's pretty good.

I love phrases that get deeper as you think about them. Phrases that open out, or in, when you turn your attention to them.

Ranting and raving over the airways

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There's a lot of ranting and raving over the airways.

And of course it's always someone being very hot and bothered by something someone else is doing. Someone who just can't seem to get off of certain subjects…

I like what Vaclav Havel said about that once:

"Hate has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact the delegation of a piece of one's own identity to them… the hater longs for the object of his hatred." –Vaclav Havel

Interesting thought.

For instance, what would Michelle Bachmann have to talk about if it weren't for the "liberal" media, and how would any of us have ever heard of her, without "liberal" doses of exposure from the media she says she so thoroughly depises?

 

Admitting selfishness & saying what you mean

Posted on by kay

The rose is one of the oldest, most beloved, most frequently used icons for the feminine principle. On the symbolic level, when Beauty said, “Bring me back a rose, Father,” in Beauty and the Beast, she was saying, "Bring me back some Mama."

On an ordinary, everyday, practical level, we can see why someone like Beauty could use an animal husband as well as some Mama. She has a bad habit of being too good.

Her sisters were acting vilely in the story, of course. Begging their father to bring back clothes and jewels and riches. But couldn’t Beauty have asked for something personal? A spool of thread? A book? New strings for her lute? No. Not this girl. She denies—even to herself—that she wants anything at all—even the rose—and it is this denial that brings on the problems in the story, not the Beast. Beauty’s denial of her own needs, her refusal to even try to figure out what she wants, brings a monster down on her whole family. In real life, a girl like this would be so passive-aggressive there’d be no living with her.

Selfishness is a basic human trait. We’re each born selfish as sea gull chicks {Mine! Mine!} ready to knock our siblings right out of the nest for any extra morsel. Selfishness is instinctual. It's a form of self-preservation, an archetypal way of acting, as demonstrated by Beauty’s sisters in Beauty and the Beast. Selfishness is the raw will to thrive in a hostile world. Thus no human being who is still breathing can be totally unselfish. We can only face up to the fact that we all have an inborn tendency to be selfish, and then try to manage that tendency without harming others.

As Thomas Moore says in Care of the Soul, there is simply no curing certain things in ourselves. All we can do is care for those things. But to take care of something, you have to—at the very least—be able to admit that it exists. Pretending not to be selfish does not equal ‘taking care of’ one’s selfishness. Pretending not to be selfish equals ignoring one’s selfishness.

Besides, if we don’t know what we want and how to go about getting it, why should anyone else know? Should other people have to read our minds so we can get whatever we want without having to come out and ask for it? That can get real nasty in real life. Not being able to just come out and say what you want—or what you mean, or what you feel—is the leading cause of resentment and divorce on the planet Earth.

But… maybe we should give a girl like Beauty the benefit of the doubt. She seems so nice. Maybe she really doesn’t want a single thing for herself. Maybe she has completely conquered all desire, like a bodhisattva.

Riiii-ght. Then she should’ve said so, "I don't want a thing, Father." Instead, she just made up a rose story to keep her sisters from getting mad at her.

Saying something you don’t mean to keep someone else happy merely allows their bad attitudes to determine your actions.

Going along with something you don’t agree with just to be polite is not civil—it’s servile. And it’s also downright dangerous, as we’re finding out every day.

Funny… how not being aware of one's own selfishness and not being able to say what you want go together so well.