Summer Reading Recommendations from Readers

Books remain indispensible to anyone seeking more than a superficial understanding of a subject. Skimming a few websites or Wikipedia entries can not provide the equivalent understanding communicated by a 300-page book. The context, framework and logic of a complex subject can only be developed in a book-length form. Hence the large number of books recommended on the above link "Books/Films," and the constant refreshing of the list with reader recommendations.

With numbing regularity, you find me recommending books to explain the subprime mortgage crisis, (Greed, Fraud & Ignorance: A Subprime Insider's Look at the Mortgage Collapse ), derivatives (Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader )and long-wave price inflation (The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History ) to name but a few topics covered here. (Note that the last two books were recommended to me by reader Cheryl A., who actually mailed me a copy of "The Great Wave." Another reader made sure I received a copy of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism .)

In other words, readers have greatly enriched my own reading, and I strive to share the wealth.

Knowledgeable reader/contributor Marc M. recently recommended these five important volumes and offered brief descriptions for each:

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability "An excellent and thorough rejoinder to mindless free-market cheerleading, with examples drawn from both the macro and micro."

(My companion-reading suggestion: Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market by Pierre Bourdieu.)

While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis "Just out, and exactly what the title suggests, with the bonus that Lowenstein is a gifted writer."

The Works: Anatomy of a City "A fun tour-de-force which takes a multimodal approach to explaining New York's infrastructure."

Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South "A no-illusions look at why the (white) American South is a lost cause for Democrats at the national level, and what can be done about it."

The Consumer Society Reader "An impressive survey of critical thought on the consumer society and its discontents, voiced by the usual (and some unusual) suspects."

Thank you, Marc, for the suggestions on such a wide array of important topics.

Other recent recommendations:

Unix Ronin recently recommended The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau;

Nellie N. recommended Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free by Ellen Hodgson Brown;

William S. recommended Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb;

(my companion suggestion: The Misbehavior of Markets)
Mike D. suggested: The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink by Robert D. Morris
and The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker

Chuck D. wrote highly of Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century's most influential thinkers.

If you're seeking a classic, inimitable novel for summer reading, I can suggest L'Assommoir by Emile Zola, set in the 1870s slums of Paris; Burning Daylight by Jack London, a rousing adventure/romance set in the fin de siecle Klondike gold rush and S.F. Bay Area, recommended to me by reader David V.; and The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, a darkly comic exploration of terrorism back in the heyday of the Anarchist/terrorist era of the early 20th century. Sadly, a very topical novel once again.

For graphic novels, if you haven't already done so, read the two-volume set The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

I would hazard that there's something for everyone in this list. (21 titles--count 'em!) As always, check for titles at your local library if you don't want to own a copy. (But as the Lowenstein book listed above explains, the budget for your local library has probably been gutted to fund your city's retirement/pension black hole.)

And for your viewing pleasure, here are four film classics recommended by film maven/contributor Don E:

Nowhere in Africa
The Sword of Doom
Story of a Prostitute
The Browning Version

More book/film suggestions

Thank you, Ioan V. ($50), for your outrageously generous donation to this site. I am greatly honored by your on-going support and readership.

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Patriotic Thoughts for the 4th of July

As things unravel, we would do well to ponder the wisdom of this quote from General Douglas MacArthur: "There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity."

In honor of July 4th, I want to give voice to something which is deeply patriotic, and I say this without irony: the greatest freedom we have in the U.S.A. is the freedom to fail. Without the freedom to fail, then you cannot learn anything of value, or truly value what you have learned and earned.

Our popular culture is obsessed with winning, public adoration, entertainment and membership in some elite. These expectations are built on a default setting of absolute security; we should all have ample FEW resources-- food, energy and water--and housing, employment, paid vacations, healthcare and pensions, too. These should all be ours simply for being born in the U.S. or by immigrating to the U.S.

With all these securities guaranteed, we are then free to pursue our dream to be on stage and win the hearts of people everywhere, etc.

But a funny thing happened on the way to our winning performance on American Idol: all the security we assumed was our birthright has turned to sand.

Maybe the only security we really have is the ability to fall, dust ourselves off and start over, and the ability to focus on opportunity rather than security.

I know many of you already "get it"--depending on entitlementts from an essentially insolvent/debt-addicted Federal government is not security.

Here is a wonderful missive from a new reader who happens to be an entrepreneur. To me, she has expressed the essence of seeing opportunity in the dissolution of security:

I own a small company and have been tooling my entrepreneurial efforts toward peak oil preparations, not in the usual sense of growing tomatoes in my backyard, but in building local economic networks. But, it has been difficult intellectually because I am deeply torn between the traditional marketing need for all-smiles-all-the-time, and the absolute reality that business as usual cannot (and won't) continue.

I strongly believe that entrepreneurial gumption is essential to the survival of any community -- it is the essence of economic adaptive iteration -- but I have felt bound and gagged from associating any thoughts on peak oil, etc., from my business activities lest I alienate potential clients.

Two critical resources have fallen into my lap. The first is a copy of Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind," which provides a mainstream hook (excuse? justification?) for blogging about business through the long emergency. The second was your Weblogs/New Media: The Power Yet to Come overview, which provided a conceptual framework for the relentless profusion of ideas, insights, interdisciplinary connections, and other thoughts I have on the subject. Thank gods I'm not the only one thinking about this stuff!

My own interest in apocalypse business is addressing looming, community-level crises with innovative business planning based on nonhierarchical networks, symbiosis, and coopetition. This is itself based on my studies of ecology, which busies itself not with mere survival but audacious wealth creation. Everywhere I look, a business plan to address future crises pops into my head. I think these could potentially be helpful in a very pragmatic sense for others. Well said, and completely appropriate for the 4th of July.

My 4th of July wish is that everyone you know who is serving in Iraq and Afghanistan comes home safely. Within our extended families, one young man gave his life in Iraq; our friend in the Marines made it home in one piece. On this 4th, let's remember all those who joined to serve and defend their nation and found themselves shipped to Iraq or Afghanistan by our civilian politicians.

Thank you, Marcus M. ($40), for your wonderfully generous donation via mail to this site. I am greatly honored by your on-going support and readership.

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Is It Possible to Escape The Consumerist Mindset?

You may have noticed that the entries this week have focused on non-financial analyses. What better time to look at American society and culture than in the week of July 4th?

While it's rewarding to ponder the financial metrics of the meltdown, a single-minded concentration on numbers and charts actively distracts us from examining the underlying causes of the U.S. meltdown and political distemper.

In a way, this focus on measurement and numbers is just another subtle form of media manipulation of the sort described in A Good Con, and The Higher Level Con (July 1, 2008). Numbers only reflect behavior, and behavior reflects beliefs, values, trends, anxieties, hopes and much more. By focusing on numbers we focus on symptoms, not the casual factors/diseases.
That the U.S. is a consumer society is accepted in much the same way that a clear sky is blue (or should be). My longtime pal G.F.B. recently posited that the only way for us to truly understand our pervasive consumerist mindset would be to obtain a report from an extraterrestrial anthropologist.

Nonetheless, even our limited terrestrial minds can distinguish appallingly obvious contradictions such as "going green" when it requires the purchase of something new. I have covered this sort of laughably contradictory discrepancy between the stated goal--"simplify your life"--and the behavior being proposed-- "buy more now!"

For another point of view, let's turn to a recent email from longtime reader David V. from the Great Northern State:

You keep addressing fictious problems. Now here are some real problems, and how to solve them. The moose eat my peas, vines, pods, roots, the whole plant. Solution: plant enough for them and me. I put out oats and barley seed and the bears lick them up. Solution: put out more seed, everyone happy.

Man-made banking, man-made investments, shopping centers, factories, etc. Just walk away and leave the things of man. You are going to die, and sooner than you hope. The meaning of life is found close to the soil; you can get into it now or get into it later. But you will get into it. This is a most interesting commentary, for it suggests that abundance--the dream of consumerism--is actually based on a much deeper deprivation. The abundance David offers is the most basic sort to the creatures around him, while the consumerist mindset is to get something others don't (yet) have, or to get the same thing as someone else has--filling a hole in the soul, if you will, with some status symbol purchase.

The promise of filling that sense of deprivation is of course the crux of modern marketing. Trigger some inadequacy/insecurity (what, you don't have the latest iPod?? Loser!) and the innate desire for novelty, and you have a marketing platform for the ages.

There are anti-consumer movements afoot, calls to stop buying and rebel against the Machine. This is nothing new, of course; rebelling against the conformity of wage-slavery and consumption goes back to at least Thoreau. The beatnik/hippie lifestyle required cheap living quarters, minimal consumption and communal sustainability, i.e. some sort of absolute-minimum income and lots of sharing/bartering.

There are other mindsets which are neither consumerist nor anti-consumerist. To those engaged in self-cultivation, consumer and anti-consumer alike are twisted round something which humanity needs like a fish needs a wheelchair.

The yin-yang of consumer and anti-consumer form yet another perfect media sideshow/ distraction. Let's follow the guy who refuses to buy anything from China--ha, look at him struggle-- and then ooh and awe at the latest excesses in glopbal consumption (today, Bahrain's wild skyscrapers! They are so cool!)

Since the Olympics are a mere month or so away, let's consider an athletic metaphor. China expert/scholar Andrew J. Nathan penned this overview of the upcoming Beijing Olympics for The New Republic by drawing upon a half-dozen books which have been written about the subject: Medals And Rights: What the Olympics reveal, and conceal, about China
Here is one important idea Nathan extracted from Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China by Susan Brownell:

What Susan Brownell calls Chinese "body culture"--ideas of health and how to get it-- revolves around notions such as "vital breath." These concepts inform such Chinese disciplines as qigong (chi gung) (slow-movement exercises) and wushu (martial arts)(gung fu), both of which she says are more about shaping the subjective experience of the body than about training the body for competition.

The Chinese state does not invest much in facilities for everyday fitness. Most urbanites "cultivate their life force" (yangsheng) through traditional arts-- tai chi, walking, keeping birds, and writing calligraphy in water on the pavement-- that can be practised for free in parks and other public spaces. The contrast of traditional body culture with the Chinese government's drive/need to "win the most gold medals" could not be starker. Once again we see how the desire for abundance--all those gold medals and the global standing they will burnish--flows from insecurity/deprivation--an ugly, unquenchable hole in the national soul.

I purposely mentioned wushu/martial arts because there has long been a debate within the many martial arts traditions and schools (there is even a form of Tai Chi called "combat Tai Chi Chuan") about the value or artifice of competition.

Now as a practitioner of a martial art (merely intermediate, a beginner in every sense), I can assure you no one person will win or lose a competition or fight based on the school they represent. The talented individual with innate skills honed by relentless internal and external training and years of sparring practice will likely win any competition, regardless of the school or specific tradition they initally learned.

Some in the Chinese martial arts community are pressing for wushu to be accepted as Olympic sports; others are more reticient or even outright opposed. will Chinese martial arts show in Beijing olympics?

The Japanese may have managed to have judo enshrined as an Olympic sport and the South Koreans also succeeded in getting taekwondo, Korea's own brand of martial art, adopted.
But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has turned a deaf ear to the more recent appeals on behalf of wushu.

"Wushu has not been included as an official sport at the Olympics but I hope that after the Games we can make the sport better known to all the people of the world," said Jiao Ruiping, aged 16, who has been learning wushu since she was nine. Those who believe kung fu is not about competition are led by the revered Shaolin Temple: Shaolin monks not to attend Olympic kung fu competition:

"Performance in Chinese martial arts can be quantified but Shaolin wushu can not be measured in that way as it contains Buddhist elements and showcases a harmonious combination of Buddhism and kung fu," Qian said.

"In ancient times, people practiced Shaolin wushu to resist outsiders, not for competitive purposes.

"Shaolin Wushu, as a cultural heritage, cannot be equal to competitive sports. They are two completely different concepts. They are all monks at Shaolin Temple, we cannot send them to take part in competitions." In other words, Wushu is fundamentally about self-cultivation and self-defense, not competition. From this view, competition is diametrically opposed to Shaolin Wushu and all that it embodies and represents.

All integrated martial arts are based on body meridians, pressure points, and flows of energy (chi)--the principles not just of self-defense but of Chinese medicine, which in the Indian tradition is known as Ayurvedic. Internal development-- mental concentration, the channeling of internal energy, etc.-- are core ideals and practices in fully realized martial arts. Martial arts, properly understood, are all about health and self-cultivation.

(Yes, you can kick a heavy bag all day long, but that's like shooting free throws all day and then reckoning you know how to play basketball. I like competition and spent years practicing for games in which points decide a win/loss. But competition is not about health, self-actualization or even physical fitness; it's about winning, as every hack coach in America can tell you ad nauseum. I beg to differ, but that's another entry.)

So believing that a nation's character and standing depend on how many gold medals its competitors win is very much the same as the consumerist dream of happiness blossoming from yet another purchase/acquisition.

From the point of traditional Wushu, the competition itself--like consumerism-- misses the entire point. It's not at all about winning and losing, or how many possessions you own or don't own.

It is an Olympic irony that we do not need to travel to Alpha Centuri for a perspective freed from the shackles of consumerism; we need only look beneath the deprived, anxious-for-glory consumerist veneer of the Beijing Olympics to find just such an "alien" point of view right in Chinese culture: Shaolin Wushu, the true glory of China.



Thank you, Tyler C. ($100), for your stunningly generous contribution to this site. I am greatly honored by your on-going support and readership.

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Alienation Nation

My reference in last week's essay The Art of Survival, Taoism and the Warring States (June 27, 2008) to camping in the wilds as a 13-year old sparked a dialog with frequent contributor Chuck D. While this topic may seem at first blush to be unimportant compared to rising gasoline and food prices or the host of other problems besetting the nation, perhaps it is one of the roots of those difficulties.

Chuck first wrote:
What a different world we grew up in where parents actually thought two 13 year old kids were capable enough to go off on their bikes like you did, and really would be able to find their way back as well as return in one piece. Somehow I don’t think we would find as many believers in that proposition today.

My reply:

I think you're so right about the fear /lack of faith in teens now. Is it the media blowing up the dangers of axe murderers, or is it real? I really don't know.

Chuck followed up with these incisive comments:

I gave your comment about teens some thought. Off the top of my head, here are some possibilities. Like you I don't know if they're right, either.

1. The kidnap/ax murder syndrome you mentioned. I suspect these things have always been around -- after all it is easy for adults to prey on kids just because they're kids and don't know how to resist. But today's mass communication media make these stories more accessible and graphic, so a parent's worst fear of losing a child this way or being molested becomes more plausible, even if it isn't any more probable than it always has been.

2. Kids aren't encouraged this way. For both harried parents and kids, it's simply easier for kids to sit with an X-box and play video games or text message friends. But if that's all you do, in the end you won't know anything more than how to sit with an X-box and play video games or text message your friends, will you? And since most people live lives completely divorced form nature today, why would they let their kids go out like that where they just "know" there are lions and tigers and bears, oh my? And since many people's lifestyles today also divorce them from much of the traditional social fabrics and networks humans have had throughout history, that avenue is pretty much closed, too.

3. The current choice architecture ordains that organized activities are the only way kids can do anything. Organized soccer leagues, organized dance lessons and recitals -- you name it. My buddy Bill the schoolteacher (here he is again) has for a number of years put together in the summer pickup baseball games with a group of regulars -- his kids, their friends, some others. He does this to recreate for them the enjoyment he had playing pickup ball when he was a kid. I score keep since I have absolutely no hand/eye coordination for anything involving a ball. He regularly complains about the difficulty he has getting kids to play and to get parents to deliver them. His conclusion: they don't appreciate it because they don't have to pay for it; when they have to pay it becomes more important to them because it cost them something.

Off the top of my head, I suspect this may have something to do with our suburban social structure and our utter dependence upon the automobile as personal transportation. Most housing plans (at least in my area) that are more than 15 years old are nothing more than lots and houses. There is literally no way for kids do these kinds of things because there has been no provision made for it -- more choice architecture. The only way they can is to get in a car and be driven to it.

Once parents have to make this investment of time and effort, the most efficient way to make sure that time and effort isn't wasted is to organize and schedule that activity to make sure it comes off. With that organization often come associated costs – uniforms, equipment, league fees, etc. These costs become icing on the cake.

After the parents pay these costs, they feel compelled to make kid go so the money isn’t wasted. And when the kid is old enough to understand that the money been spent on him or her, they have an additional reason to feel compelled to go beyond the fact that they may have simply wanted to do it in the first place.

Excellent work, Chuck D.--thank you for the penetrating analysis of teens, "leisure," and activities.

I am not a sociologist or anthropologist; I am just another citizen who's traveled a bit and lived in a variety of places. Here are my thoughts on some of the issues Chuck D. has so cogently raised.

1. The value of time. Teens' leisure time is viewed through a class lens. Parents with upper-middle class aspirations and/or lifestyles see teens' "free time" as either a danger to their well-being (i.e. drifting into bad circles of peers, experimenting with sex and drugs, etc.) or a waste of time, as the parents are looking at a competitive world and seeing the benefits of violin lessons, soccer, volunteering, etc.--all the "goodies" that give applicants an edge when applying to elite universities.

Lower class kids' parents are often either not around (divorced, never married, Dad is in prison, etc.), too stretched/overwhelmed to do more than put food on the table, or busy with their own entertainments/romances etc. to do more than hope their kids stay out of serious trouble.

The upper-class teens are often scheduled to within an inch of their lives, and lavished with cars at a young age so they can transport themselves to all their success-enhancing activities. Lower-class kids have plenty of time to experiment with drugs and sex (yikes, just like we feared) and also to while away entire lifetimes playing videogames, etc.

Both of these seem deeply flawed models of teen development. The angst of rushing around meeting obligations does prepare you in a way for adult life, but what are you missing in the wholesale assumption of an overscheduled life?

And the ennui of "nothing to do" after school--how exactly is that healthy? What is a kid drifting around "downtown" or absorbed in an Xbox game losing in the way of experience in the real world?

The presumed villains in the piece: technology (games, IM, texting, etc.), and overwhelmed/ missing parents. Yes, the Web and videogames now offer a wider range of passive distractions, but plenty of kids wasted their afternoons watching Gilligan's Island long before the advent of personal computers.

As for distracted parents: while it's true fewer mothers worked in the 50s and 60s, plenty did, and their kids were not automatically stamped as criminals and wastrels as a result.

Chuck D. certainly revealed a key determinant: the suburbs, with their distance from any town center and the resultant dependence on cars. But as Bill Bryson has often described in his gentle tales of growing up in the 60s, suburban neighborhoods were not that different in the 60s; most everyone needed a car to get around, and there was little formalized activity for kids/teens.

2. What seems different is the relative levels of participation and passivity. Here is a partial list of stuff I/we did at 12, 13 and 14 years of age; many of you could easily assemble similar lists:

throw a lot of stones at buoys on the lake, especially when I was "the new kid in town" and had no friends
toss a basketball at my homemade backboard a few thousand times
throw the football with my brother (post pattern, one thousand times)
row out on the lake to try fishing (rarely caught anything)
carve little boats and float them down the creek
skateboard down Death Hill (gravel in knee, ouch)
get my stepdad to go to the town dump and haul an old rowboat home so I could patch the holes and paint it (hey, my own boat!)
tear apart the go-cart Briggs & Stratton engine with a buddy, and reassemble it (hey, it works!)
shovel snow in winter or mow lawns in summer for a few dollars
see how far out we could get on the lake ice before it broke
shoot tin cans and old plastic ship models with our .22s
hiking, rock-climbing, biking, etc. as previously described

At 15 and 16 years old:
snorkel/spearfish
ride my stepdad's old 500cc Matchless motorcycle
shoot another couple thousand baskets
body-surf
hiking, exploring
co-found and edit underground newspaper at high school
and so on.

Yes, I was on the basketball and football teams, not as a result of prowess or talent but simply because the school was so small any 98-pound weakling could get on any team simply by showing up for practice.

None of this was out of the ordinary, and many young teens are still engaged in exactly these kinds of activities--mostly informal, unsupervised, chosen of their own free will, and not troublesome to parents or society. Many others are doing more responsible activities like 4-H.
But gee--dangers abounded. Skateboarding with no helmet. Oh my. Cleaning an old engine with gasoline--poison--and then careening around on the back of a flimsy go-cart. Out on the lake, Playing on the ice. Snorkeling without parents around, ditto riding a heavy motorcycle over dirt roads, and so on.

It does seem as if the dangers and risks of growing up have been somewhat exaggerated. Yes, some kids are killed or drowned or maimed, and each one is tragic. Some activities are too dangerous for unsupervised participation. But the general cultural mindset seems to be that if an activity isn't supervised and formalized, it is inherently risky.

And that is true. But then how do kids learn risk assessment if they're coddled, guided and protected at every turn? I am not celebrating danger, just pointing out that compared to the slaughter we blithely tolerate on our highways (30,000 killed every year, tens of thousands more seriously injured), then the risks of skateboarding, boating, etc. pale in comparison.
The message seems to be: we'd rather you were passively, "safely" at home when you're not in a formally structured activity. And if you're out and about, then we fear/assume you're hanging out with a bad crowd and endangering yourself with drugs and sex.

Is it coincidence that visitor counts at the national parks are down? I mean before gasoline skyrocketed--this decline is a long-term trend.

Is it coincidence that kids are pudgy, out of shape and increasingly unhealthy?

And is it coincidence that while citizens in other developed countries are spontaneously protesting high energy prices (a futile expression, to be sure), Americans grimly and passively accept this burden? Is that wisdom, or merely bulletproof passivity?

Where did teens learn to be fearful, paranoid, passive, unengaged, and eager for drugs and negative distractions? Did those inner states spring unbidden from within them, or are those the meta-messages they get from the culture?

Yes, I know many suburbs and city neighborhoods have no access to creeks, lakes or Nature in any form except lawns and weeds. That is deprivation, to be sure. But is the only option then to stay indoors and play videogames?

Yes, I know ghettos are dangerous, gun-and drug-infested mires, and there are few to none parks or recreational facilities. Those are especially challenging places to raise teens. When I lived in Detroit, we walked to the YMCA to shoot hoops and played in the alley. Maybe this is impossible now, I don't know. But let's not forget that 95% of the nation is not a ghetto. What's the excuse then?

3. Trust. What meta-message are we sending teens when we are so terribly frightened of their presumptive mismanagement of their lives? Isn't the real message something like: we did such a distracted, guilt-ridden poor job of raising you that we don't trust you to act responsibly on your own behalf?

The more you sequester kids from reality, the less prepared they will be when they finally have to deal with reality on their own. It seems the number of parents who are still financially supporting their offspring in their 20s and even 30s and still extracting them from life's difficulties is legion. When did life get so dangerous that your kids can never really take care of themselves?

Yes, things are more expensive now, and more of a challenge in many ways. But surviving the 1980-83 recession was no piece of cake, either. It has rarely been easy to establish oneself.
4. Drugs. Parents and the culture seem obsessed with the dangers of drug use, and to be sure cocaine and "ice"/meth are horribly destructive drugs. Being doped out on pot is also a deadend, ditto being drunk all the time. These are serious risks.

But what about the legal drugs parents are shoving down their kids' throats? Anxious before a test? Here, load up on these pills. And then when the poor kid commits suicide, the parents are devastated. Oops, didn't we mention the suicidal thoughts side-effects? Sorry about that.
Could some of the passivity and paranoia in our culture stem from an overprescribed stew of legal psychotropic drugs? It is something worth pondering.

And how many kids who are excited about their interests and secure in their worth as a human being want to go do drugs anyway? Are drugs the symptom of a deeper malaise? It's certainly easier to blame the drug dealer than to look at why kids are drawn to dead-ends in the first place.

5. Excellence, visibility and failure. Why try out for a team if all you'll be is a benchwarmer? Better to just passively drift home and stare at a screen. That is the meta-message of a celebrity/status-obsessed culture which focuses ever greater attention on the elites: the elite universities, the corporate elite, the elite travel spots, and so on. If you can't be recognized as in the top tier, the best of the best, then better not to try. Or try and then give up in bitterness. I sacrificed all that for nothing.

Is this one of the meta-messages of our culture?

And if you can't succeed at the highest levels of formalized activities for recognition, what else is there to aspire to? Self-sufficiency? Self-development? What the heck are those? All we understand is competition, winning, recognition, and failure.

What an impoverished view of living. With those as choices, no wonder we're an out-of-shape, passive society disengaged from the real world and from the political structures which define and dominate our lives.

I worked very hard to be a benchwarmer, and it was not a failure to be on the team; it was a success to even be on the same bench as my talented teammates.

6. Self-sufficiency. Plenty of kids have chores around the home, but plenty don't. All too often I see teens who are lolling around their PCs while the yard remains a mess, waiting for Mom or Dad to come home and make dinner. Are they disabled? When did the culture dictate that teens should either be bribed with significant money to do some minimal chores, or left to pursue their IM'ing etc. with essentially zero responsibilities other than not dropping out of school?

Ask little of people, and you get little in return. Coddle people and you get people who can't take care of themselves. Treat people as cripples and you get people who think manipulation and victimhood are the most important life skills to develop.

OK, that sounds harsh, but what messages are teens getting from worried, over-protective parents and society? Without our constant protection, you're dangerous, and a mess; left alone, you'll fail, or drown, or be eaten by bears or be kidnapped and murdered. How about giving them some life skills like being aware of your surroundings, of being sensitive to intuition and warning signs of danger, of learning to "trust, but verify"? How about giving them a chance to practice those skills on their own, and demanding they learn life skills like cooking real meals? It isn't torture, it's rewarding. Where did the message come from that taking care of the yard/vegetable garden and making dinner were onerous burdens to be shucked off in favor of gazing dully at some idiot's-delight screen?

Maybe the roots of our difficulties lie precisely in the nexus of these meta-messages about trust, danger, passivity and self-sufficiency.

Thank you, Eugenio M. ($20), for your continuing outrageously generous support of this site. I am greatly honored by your on-going support and readership.

Readers' comments/corrections on letting banks fail.
Readers Journal commentaries week of July 1, 2008 Survival strategies and more.
Social Contracts and the Art of Survival.
Perpetual growth, The Red Queen’s Race and Soylent Green

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A Good Con, and The Higher Level Con

We all know how a good con works: establish some common ground, evoke sympathy or a bedrock value, then take the mark for all he's worth.

The Republican Con works by evoking a schizophrenic duality of patriotism--if you love your country, then you'll do what your government tells you, like support this distant war--and fear of that same government--they're trying to strip your rights to own guns, regulations are strangling us all, etc.

Toss in vast pork-barrel deficit spending and give-aways to the elites (non-existent regulations on investment bankers' derivatives books and deals, etc.), and you have a Great Con; the marks pony up their votes easy as you please.

The Democratic Con evokes sympathy, and the distrust of The Powers That Be. Don't you want to aid the victims of injustice, and the underprivileged? That runs deep in most major religions: charity, compassion, sharing. Yes, of course we do. And don't you know it's those filty-rich elites which are strangling us all with their "corporate wealthfare" and offshore banking tax havens?
Toss in vast pork-barrel deficit spending and give-aways to the elites (a slightly different set, with lots of overlap), and you have a Great Con; the marks pony up their votes easy as you please.

But the Higher Level Con is distracting the marks with a false choice. All truly great propaganda machines work this "manufacturing consent" vein: give the media just enough leeway to create the sense of diverse topics and coverage, so the citizenry accept this simulacrum of "free press" for the real thing.

In a coarse analogy, hammer the people with the choice between Bud and Bud Light, while keeping the good stuff to yourself.

The other trick to "manufacturing consent" is to keep a terrible, frightening, powerful, threatening enemy handy. Nobody works this better than the Chinese government, who can whip up the populace in a mere moment to riot outside Carrafour stores or the U.S. Embassy, and then disband the crowd right when they're about to become dangerous. The citizenry gets to blow off steam built up living in a corrupt, repressive, unjust system, and the Party dodges their wrath by erecting convenient "enemies" to vent at as regularly as night and day.

For more on just how skillful the Chinese are at the Higher Level Con, read these two pieces from The New Republic:

Medals And Rights What the Olympics reveal, and conceal, about China by Andrew J. Nathan

The Last Hero of Tiananmen How an aging doctor became the conscience of China by Philip P. Pan

And in an ironic twist, here's a lengthy expose of the U.S. media's collusion (and perhaps much worse) in phony stock trading, which nails the Editor-in-Chief of The New Republic for his connection to cheerleader superstar Jim Cramer's hedge fund: Deep Capture (Thanks to Tony K. for the link)

So how much of this election cycle media coverage is merely a Higher Level Con, the careful pruning of issues and coverage to a phony little plot of ersatz "debate"? How much is the modern equivalent of staged Coliseum battles between sideshow gladiators, a constantly hyped distraction?

Examples abound. The false "debate" in the mainstream financial media is whether the Fed should raise or lower the Fed Funds rate a quarter point or so.

Meanwhile, the real debate should be about abolishing the Federal Reserve entirely, and about the role of a quasi-central bank in a supposedly free-market economy. But that debate has been shoved aside; only "crackpots" call for the dissolution of the quasi-central bank called the Fed.
Here's another. The two candidates are essentially arguing about whether to run a $500 billion deficit, or a $1 trillion deficit. Obama May Produce $1 Trillion Deficit, Gross Says (Thanks to Craig M. for the link)

Bill Gross, manager of the world's biggest bond fund, said a Barack Obama administration may produce the first $1 trillion deficit and intermediate-and long- term bond yields have already reached cyclical lows.

Higher taxes for hedge-fund managers and oil companies will not cover anticipated Obama tax cuts for the poor and middle- class, universal health care and aid to the depressed residential real estate market, said Gross, a long-time Republican.

"This economy will need a jolt of $500 billion or so of government spending real quick," Gross, co-chief investment officer of Newport Beach, California-based Pimco, said in an open letter to Obama, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, published on the company's Web site today.
The likely expenditures and increased borrowing suggest that "intermediate and long-term yields on government bonds have already bottomed and will gradually rise" through the next four years and possibly beyond, Gross said, in his analysis that assumes Obama will defeat his presumptive Republican adversary, John McCain.

Meanwhile, the debate should be about cutting spending to match tax revenues, and discussing just how devastating higher interest rates will be. But no, only "crackpots" actually think the government shouldn't run trillion-dollar deficits. Come on, people, a $500 Billion deficit is practically "a balanced budget" nowadays.

The Republicans have mastered the Cultural Distraction Higher Level Con for years. The Democrats just don't have anything to match this firepower. As the U.S. system is shaking loose and the bolts are snapping off, the Repub strategists ready their attack: "Gay Marriage! It's the very most important issue in the entire galaxy! Drop everything and focus on this! Who cares if you're about to be evicted and laid off, forget that and focus on the horrible deadly enemy, Gay marriage! Oops, that's for next month--we mean Al Qaeda!"

The Nazis were also masters of manufacturing threats to culture and to national security, and the consequences of such manufactured consent are well known. Of course Nazi Germany was fascist and China is Communist and the U.S. is a liberty-loving bastion of freedom. And it is, in one way, and that must drive the Powers That Be crazy: the blogosphere, how do we control the blogosphere? We're losing our monopoly on information and "framing the issues," dammit!

Poor elites, Chinese and American; they share the same nasty problem. The Internet has changed the game and it's harder and harder to maintain the monopoly required to manufacture consent. The Chinese government has thousands of staffers toiling away on the "Great Firewall of China," blocking non-Chinese sites and blogs, and shutting down homegrown critics' websites. Thank goodness so many Americans are addicted to cable TV; it's a lot easier to control the agenda of networks like CNBC and entertainers like Jim Cramer than it is to control the web.

And so the Higher Level Con plays on. The issue today, and every day: Bud or Bud Light?

New Reader commentaries and essays:
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Social Contracts and the Art of Survival.
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