Although the average cubical jockey couldn’t yet pretend to assiduous application while shoe shopping, his survival still largely depended on the ability to appear busy. For temps, workloads could range from negligible (if replacing a do-nothing) to overwhelming (if supporting do-nothings). As temps in the latter category were subsumed by document-production work, there was no need to pretend to anything; they were formatting and learning software to save their asses. It was replacing a do-nothing that required the cultivation of a busy facade and the counterfeit currency of affirmation and dedication. And it was the world outside the cubicle that presented the greatest risk of appearing idle.

Thus many temps employed what a temp friend of mine dubbed “the office charge.” This was a quick, professionally precise gait toward a nonexistent goal—a B-line without a B. Whether on your way to the can, the kitchen to scavenge meeting leftovers or the alleyway to smoke a cigarette, the office charge made it look like urgent business. And the addition of a prop, such as a folder or document, augmented the credibility of your show of hurried officiousness.

Temps weren’t the only ones employing the office charge. An office thief who worked in one of my buildings used it to great effect for over four months. When the police finally caught him, he gave a full confession of his method: wear a suit, swing a briefcase, carry an ostensibly important document and rush through the hallways. As he appeared professionally preoccupied and pressed for time, no one paid him any mind. When the coast was clear, he’d duck into a cubicle, rifle through the drawers, throw whatever he could into the briefcase and leave the building. Then he’d hock his spoils in the Tenderloin, buy a bag of dope and hole up in a residence hotel. When further questioned, he said that he considered it not just a job but a way of life—that he really liked his work and the people he worked with: “They’re polite and mostly intelligent.”

The problem with the office charge was its reliance on appearance; if misused or overused it could damage your credibility and make you look like a jackass (in either order). It was therefore important to confine it to high-visibility exits. In the meantime, nonappearance was the most reliable and consistently applied technique of appearing busy. Nonappearance not only decreased the amount of information on which others could form judgments but allowed them to assume the best, which was that people were actually working. As absorption in work was usually the reason for not being anywhere but at work, it was also assumed to be the reason for not being anywhere at all.

It now occurs to me that nonappearance, which in the temp’s case was a matter of hiding in one’s cubicle for most of the day, mimicked the highest ranks of the company hierarchy. After all, the privileged, like the famous, are exclusive. Seldom in body, they’re omnipresent in mind. And, generally, the higher the rank the more exclusive the executive and the less demonstrative and more attributed his power and efficacy. On entering white-collardom, I immediately noticed how executives tended to remove themselves from their decisions. Like the Wizard of Oz, they manipulated the controls from behind a curtain (mahogany doors) and let the rabble fill in the blanks. They granted live interviews with a parsimony relative to rank and exercised control with a minimum of physical presence, projecting a persona that the Oompa Loompas granted potency. Whether temps consciously took an example from these absconded deities or not, they certainly benefitted from acting like them.

But temps, being the lowest of the low, couldn’t always be absent. There were situations that demanded a stationary personal presence and called for another survival technique: impersonality. Impersonality is an attitude grown out of the condition of being hopelessly subordinate and dispensable. Like the inscrutably impassive butler, the cucumber-cool house slave or the Victorian servant behind the walls, the impersonal temp assumed the role of an intellectual and emotional eunuch. He was there, yes, but as revealing as a customs agent and expressive as wood-grain laminate.

However boorish this impersonality was, it did well for those who assumed it. I had occasion to see several very blasé temps take permanent positions, probably because they gave the impression that they didn’t exist for anything but the job. They didn’t take sides, they didn’t take risks, they didn’t compete, they didn’t gossip and they didn’t self-indulge, despite their David Schwimmer hair. And, like their absence, their platitudinousness was attributed to their work—that is, it was taken as a function of their profession. I have to admit that these strong-boorish-types had a certain dramatic tension about them; they kept you in suspense for a ray of light, a crack in the door of their walking solitary confinement.

Reflecting on these three survival techniques—the office charge, absence, and impersonality—I notice that they’re all a kind of absence. Nor can I help but notice how pervasive they have become. For instance, every time I see one of those “power walkers”—you know, those Dacron-dipped, iPod-nano-charged, pedometer-monitored cellulite burners with horizontally gyrating forearms—I see myself with an arbitrary memo in hand, tie flapping, charging through the fluorescent-lighted tunnels of a downtown building to some remote latrine.

As for nonpresence, its pedestrian form can be found in portable escape-and-communication technology (PECT). Ears full of news or music, eyes fixed on a screen, hands busy with buttons, mind communicating something to someone somewhere else, your motives may vary but the effect is the same: “Excuse me, I’m elsewhere.” And once armed with an excuse for not being entirely present, it’s only a short step to being defensively absent—to taking cover in your PECT and, for example, wearing those “ear buds” or clamping that gadget to your noggin just to avoid the importunities of direct human contact.

This ostentatious preoccupation or cowardly exclusivity has actually become a status symbol. Not only is it expensive (iPhone MSRP, $299; unlimited service, $130 per month) but it advertises one’s importance to others (the tribe). Now people wear their PECTs and PECT conversations like jewelry. While this was inevitable with devices you could take anywhere, who suspected that people would use them to be conspicuously unavailable? That they’d take their PECTs to bars and clubs and talk, text, email and Tweet in order to appear to be only worth someone else’s attention somewhere else.

As for impersonality, I’m not sure exactly when it became the new personality. All I know is that, like being cool, a survival tactic of those who didn’t matter somehow became the virtue of those who did. As far back as 1995 a friend said to me, “Now it’s cool to be a normal guy.” That’s when I realized that average was not only common but special. I saw the unassuming, unintending, unoriginal, uncultivated, unidimensional and monotonic schlub-next-door appearing more and more in television commercials and on the streets, looking like a third-grade baseball-card collector in all but the babe on his arm. As impersonality became the paragon of character, so advanced the Age of Ubiquity. And so rebounded our economy in a wash of Windows PCs, Dockers, Polo shirts, SUVs and baseball caps.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2009, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

]]> http://www.philippic.com/2009/12/temporary-life-5-survival-of-the-absent/feed/ http://www.philippic.com/2009/11/if-it-aint-private-it-aint-republican/ http://www.philippic.com/2009/11/if-it-aint-private-it-aint-republican/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:18:01 +0000 admin http://www.philippic.com/?p=30 A few years back, when Dubya was ridin’ his wooden horse hard, I was in a bar talking to a gal who at some point proclaimed, or admitted, that she was a republican. I asked what made her a republican, and she testified to her belief that the government should do nothing with regard to the environment, poverty, crime, discrimination, pollution, disease, illiteracy, stupidity and every other social ill since the age of Cain. Her point wasn’t a stumper: government solutions to social problems don’t work. I asked if public service and governance weren’t essentially social—if these weren’t designed to address the conditions of civilization. To that I got more of the same: social programs are unnecessary because the problems they failingly address would otherwise fix themselves and everything works best on its own in accordance with the natural, self-regulating way of things. So it’s all up to the individual? I asked. To which she answered with an unequivocal yes. In a flash I saw the genius of republicanism: an abdication of the necessity of improving society, thus narrowing the job of governance down to eliminating the public sector and putting public money in private hands.

To most politically informed people it’s almost a platitude to say that republicans have little or no interest in collective, hence social, betterment. As to why this is the case, the first item of the republican pledge makes it clear enough: “I believe that the strength of our nation lies with the individual and that each person’s dignity, freedom, ability and responsibility must be honored.” Which boils down to a belief that individuals form society, not the reverse. From this stem other individualistic credos, like this one regarding the economy: “Free enterprise and encouraging individual initiative have brought this nation opportunity, economic growth and prosperity.” This boils down to a belief that individuals, not society, create prosperity. The republican ideological emphasis on the individual naturally stands in opposition to programs addressing large-scale, hence social, problems. And it follows that this belief manifests in a push toward smaller government and more private-sector activity. For both industry magnates and republican politicians know that rich individuals, not rich societies, make rich individuals.

Since that barroom revelation my view of republicanism has grown more nuanced. I see that republicans genuinely believe that where individuals are given the greatest liberty the very best will prevail. This belief is not only optimistic, it accounts for their almost total incompetence at addressing the problems of civilization. Sure, they’re good at rallying their base by loud calls for smaller government and freer markets; but they are so myopically focused on the individual that general trends and forces have little to no influence on their statecraft. Take the financial and housing markets, for instance, where tax cuts and deregulation stimulated hyperinflation to virtual collapse; take health care, where the goal is not to provide it but to deliver it to insurance monopolies; take foreign policy, where they initiated two wars with the objective of turning tribal theocracies into free-market democracies; take education, where the goal has been either to reform it with unfunded mandates, to privatize it, or to turn it into a lottery; take the economy, where by tax cuts, military spending and private-sector contracts they have run up the biggest deficit in world history. It’s as if by doing nothing for society republican politicians have fulfilled their own prophesy that the government can’t govern.

The Republican Party ascended to second party in power in 1856 with the slogan, “Free labor, free land, free men.” The intent at the time was to mobilize the middle class to entrepreneurship, stimulate land use and end slavery. Things have changed since. Slavery is done with, most of the land is used, and the U.S. has gone from an industrial to an information economy, which means that its labor force requires education. Given the short supply of freedoms left to grant, the GOP’s agenda has narrowed significantly: the freedom to capitally infuse the so-called “job creators” (campaign contributors) with public money, the freedom to allow these so-called “job creators” to profit with impunity at the expense of general economic stability, and the freedom to defer to God & Son on matters of social, hence moral, iniquity. The current slogan should be, “Put us on TV and you’ll go free, here and hereafter.”

I speculate that republicanism’s cheery unaccountability for general social problems has its origins in Adam Smith, who persuasively argued that individual self-interest, not social interest, is the force that drives the so-called “wealth of nations.” Smith nicely articulated that what benefits society involuntarily emerges out of self-interest and not the intention to improve society. He even reasoned that the crimes of self-interest, being bad for business, are generally avoided out of, what else but, self-interest. Thus, in Smith’s view, the individual is the cause, not the effect, of society. But Smith, like many great thinkers of the Enlightenment, was a scholar advocating for greater liberty under big churches, big monarchies and mercantilist nation states. And, while his theory of self-interest—that it eventuates in general well-being and suppresses aberrant individual behavior—plays out nicely on the individual level, it does not run as smoothly when it comes to consolidated or collective errantry in a post-industrial federal republic.

The nature of entities like corporations and industry cartels is different from that of individuals. For instance, an individual would probably not charge another individual $60 dollars for falling a few cents short on a $2-dollar cup of Joe. However, what would be considered unjust on the individual level is not regarded as such when committed by the financial-industry giants that finance GOP campaigns. To grant corporations and industry cartels the freedoms of individuals is to grant them the freedom to do things individuals would never do. Thus the optimistic republican faith that general well-being involuntarily issues from individual self-interest has done little in practice but accelerate the Pareto principle and the inflation-deflation rollercoaster.

The belief in individual initiative alone as a wealth-generator is naturally supply-side and naturally disparages taxation as a “redistribution of wealth.” Through the lens of individualism public health care becomes “socialized medicine,” civil rights legislation “social programming,” and education something you can pay for if you think you need it. Progressive income taxes, public services and civil rights legislation are solutions to social problems that are really the individual’s problems in socialist drag. To republicans, just about everything the government does (but war) is a “government takeover” because it is the government taking over the work that a few self-starters would otherwise do. And it makes no difference, as history shows, that governments can address large-scale problems better than individuals can (if individuals can address them at all), because we’re talking about a belief here, and beliefs trump evidence.

This begs the question as to why, if republicans are, as a matter of faith, opposed to public solutions to public problems, they bother to run for public office at all. Do they have an instinct that their own prosperity might depend on public prosperity? That their own well-being cannot be provided for solely by individuals? That even prosperous individuals owe their prosperity to society? That supply is a waste without demand? I say “instinct” because, if they do have it, they have no consciousness of it. Rather, they insist in the face of the most glaring evidence that public problems like unaffordable health care, negligent education, runaway markets and systemic environmental breakdown can be solved by local governments and a few rich individuals. They still deny that the government can solve big problems and that some problems, like global warming, even exist.

Fortunately their denial has not been consistent; there have been a few exceptions of an admission to error in the doctrine of self-interest. Allan Greenspan, for instance, conceded before the Congressional Committee for Oversight and Government Reform on October 23, 2008, “I found a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.” The flaw, of course, was in “the model” and not Greenspan. But he did identify it as the assumption that markets act in their own interest. Too bad it took a crisis to figure out that markets, perhaps because they are not individuals, don’t act like individuals. And this flaw in the model was no Johnny-come-lately. It caused the Panic of 1893, where it was no individual’s fault but that of unregulated lending practices surrounding the railroad boom. The Panic of 1907, set in motion by banks lending money to the United Copper Company’s scheme to corner the market, was not solely Otto Heinze’s fault but that of a lot of gamblers on Heinze’s bad bet. Leading up to the Great Depression, whole market sectors floundered (agriculture, coal, railroads and textiles) while others enjoyed two-fold prosperity (stock market speculation and industrials), which allowed Hoover’s ill-conceived reliance on state and local governments and the free-market to correct large-scale economic skewness. That should have been the GOP’s last lesson in what not to do. Instead, the amnesiac drift of a few decades of stability and prosperity saw Regan unpacking Hoover’s portrait, dusting it off and hanging it on his office wall.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2009, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

It took me some time to figure out why there was all this positive-attitude propaganda in the American white-collar workplace. Meanwhile, the drawbacks of a positive attitude were clear from the start: first, it was an attitude—you could assume it in regard to almost anything, from the beneficial to the depraved—thus it was somewhat arbitrary; second, having encountered a number of very positive fanatics, liars, lunatics and sociopaths in my time, it was anything but a mark of moral excellence or mental health; third, it mattered much less than the ability to do the work.

At first I feared that valuing a positive attitude over competence would result in a bunch of unproductive “can-do” schmoozers enjoying unwarranted favor for their preposterous and annoying positivity. And, yes, a few pathologically positive ghouls were in circulation, annoying the fuck out of those who had things to do. But most folks in the downtown offices were in it for a paycheck. To them, a job was a job, not a showcase for mental and emotive ascendancy. Most were, therefore, impervious to the motivational propaganda issuing from the offices of the managers and corporate consultants. Still, I’d see quotes pinned to cubicle walls like “Workin’ hard for the money,” as if they were defending themselves against this motivational spin by a show of sweat-of-thy-brow common sense.

So, what was all this motivational propaganda about? Not only was it preposterous that attitudinal correctness should supercede competence, but it put managers in the role of attitude shapers, extending their influence across the labor-brain barrier, where it had no business. Granted, this was the early 1990s, an era marked by an unprecedented flatulence of perception-shaping euphemisms and acronyms from the gluteal lobes of organizational blowhards. Meanwhile, the actual social and historical conditions were such as you’d find in any recession: job insecurity, job scarcity, crime, scams, idleness, crumbling infrastructures… But the perception shapers were blowing HR PR so hard that it amounted to a campaign of positive denial: companies were “downsizing” and “restructuring” (firing and obsolescing) while they were promulgating boundless positivity in a best of all possible worlds.

A typical example of the sort of language that issued from this false-positive culture was the catch phrase can-do. In this phrase we have an affirmation of being both capable (”can”) and active (”do”). It describes no other state but that of readiness and willingness. Life, on the other hand, is conditional, excluding us more than it includes us, showing us more of what we lack than have, paining us more for what we can’t do than can, even limiting us to doing and thinking only one thing at a time—to being only one being at a time. The phrase can do pays no heed to the conditions of life because it is designed to deny them. It is fundamentally an attitude, and, specifically, one that expresses loyalty, compliance and servitude. Like so much white-collar motivational ballyhoo, it serves the affirmation-seeking sentimentality of those in charge more than the actual well-being of the peon.

In the offices of Blue Shield, after a particularly nasty round of layoffs, large buttons were distributed that read, “I Value Blue Shield’s New Culture—Ask Me How.” Needless to say, nobody wore them but a few frightened middle-managers, and nobody bothered to ask them how they valued Blue Shield’s “new culture,” lest it be taken for sarcasm. In Blue Shield’s Healthtrac newsletter (volume IX, number 3, page 1), an anonymous writer published the following: “Eleven Proven Ways to Get along Better with Everyone.” Riddled with solecisms and misspellings, the eleven platitudes ranged from keeping promises, considering the effects of what you say, giving compliments, suppressing anger, abstaining from gossip, to being funny. As sensible as it is to be considerate, trustworthy, generous, temperate and a barrel of laughs in an atmosphere of mistrust, resentment and cynicism, the “eleven ways” were immediately ignored or mocked.

While all this motivational pap, team talk and positive attitudination seemed mawkish and cultish, it was familiarly so. It reminded me of those New Age motivational therapy cults, such as LifeSpring, that had gulled my parents back in the 1970s. What I encountered in office culture was the usual Puritan work-destiny paradigm—making a religion out of work—decked out in the latest pop-psycho drag. This motivational propaganda espoused the same Panglossian premise that the self-renovators of the ’70s had—namely, that the only thing between people and paradise is how they process experience, which is to say that, like Intel, it’s “all inside.”

This concern with the internal state of people was not always associated with earning a living. Its induction into the professional context started in the 1950s, with organizational psychology and the rise of the big corporation. As the social sciences established themselves, large business organizations were regarded as social systems to be studied, and programs such as “organizational behavior” found their way into business management schools. The social revolution of 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of individualized learning and self-development, with corporations instituting such programs as “sensitivity training” or, in an organization where I recently worked, “cultural competence.” Throughout the 1980s, as the U.S. shifted from an industrial to an information economy, the necessity of lean manufacturing, downsizing and corporate restructuring fueled a consulting boom, much of which focused on disarming the disgruntled. By the 1990s, when I entered the white-collar world, job security and inter-company mobility were all but dead, and corporate-culture consulting was all the rage.

Many of these corporate consultancies evolved out of pop-psychology group-training seminars. The most famous example of these was EST (Erhard Seminar Training, or “to be” in Latin), founded by Werner Hans Erhard (Paul Rosenberg by birth). In the early 1960s, Erhard sold correspondence courses in the Midwest, then became a training manager for Encyclopedia Britannica’s “Great Books” program, then took a job with the Parent’s Magazine Cultural Institute as territorial manager, which brought him to San Francisco. One fine day, while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, he had an epiphany that everything was “perfect as it is,” which suggested that humans might be ‘trained’ to stop making a prejudicial, prepossessing and presumptuous hash of their lives. EST convinced a generation weary of the negativity of the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal to refer it all to, not society, but the self.

The success of EST spawned LifeSpring, the next most popular New Age experiential training cult, founded by John Hanley, one of Erhard’s EST colleagues. LifeSpring, like EST, basically dismantled the biases, preconceptions and habitual thought patterns by which people psychologically managed the intensity and variety of experience. Its trainings deconstructed the safe and familiar ways in which people processed experience, discouraging rational remove and encouraging immediate expression and personal exposure. Its trainers employed dialectical rhetoric to expose inhibitive and dismissive habits of thought, thus allowing participants to discard these for more spontaneous and honest expressions. Indeed, some of the students of EST and LifeSpring shed their prejudices, fears and inhibitions and realized the possibility of expressing themselves honestly. Others filed law suits.

Erhard disbanded EST in 1984 and established Landmark Education in 1987, the branches of which (The Vanto Group and Teknico, both business consultancies, and the EST-derived personal training, The Landmark Forum) offered corporate and organizational training seminars throughout the 1980s and ’90s. In fact, Landmark still pushes its goods to this day, training over 200,000 participants and banking about $76 million yearly. All this goes to show that the attitudinal gurus and mind managers are still at it, and to as little effect on the actual world we live in.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2009, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) show that in 2007 Americans twelve years and older used half as many illicit drugs as they did in 1979 (down from 14% to 7%). However, the data also show that between 2004 and 2007 past-month non-medical use of prescription drugs went up 13%, and pain-reliever abuse went up from 19% to 25%. This trend is not fueled by Mexican drug cartels but by the pharmaceutical industry, and it shows that the drug culture has changed significantly.

Allow me to step back to 1969. I was a kid living in the semi-rural area north of San Francisco, Marin County, which was at that time a Mecca for the “tune in and drop out” generation. The hippies, who sought a natural, communal, spiritual way of life, largely regarded drugs as a form of spiritual discovery. I remember my mother lying on the couch muttering to herself after taking mescaline, while on the stereo Jimmy Hendrix asked, “Are you experienced?” Even at the age of five I knew that “experienced,” in this sense, meant a drug-induced experience—an ironic play on professional experience—and that my mom was having such an experience.

Fast-forward to 2009, I’m a professional in my mid-forties, commuting to my office job, riding a bus that passes through the poorest areas of otherwise affluent Alexandria, Virginia and stops near a methadone clinic. On the facing seat is a man my age, with a sickly pallor under wood-colored flesh that is so fatigued it hangs on his bones. He whimpers and mutters to himself. He’s having an experience, but one very different from my mother’s. There’s no cultural demonstration, political statement or spiritual exploration involved; he’s a guy who lives in a suburb, apparently shops at Ross, likely works retail, and happens to be so high on the painkiller methadone that his inner state has obscured his surrounds. Furthermore, his “experience” is not only culturally and politically isolated, mattering to no one but himself, but perfectly legal.

Drug trends reflect cultural trends. The drug culture of the 1960s was part of a counterculture that also involved rock music and sexual liberation. Getting high had significance as a revolt against repressive norms and the status quo. By the 1970s, as the counterculture became pop culture, the nature of drug use became “recreational,” which is to say, a way to have fun. By the 1980s, sex, drugs and rock-n-roll had lost their spirit of revolt. I remember an anti-drug billboard in the mid-1980s that depicted a young professional, suited-up, swinging a briefcase and smiling elatedly, over which were the words, “The average cocaine addict.” This, ironically, indicated that drug abuse was common among self-advancing, self-interested, self-promoting and socially respectable professionals. Today, drug use is even further removed from psychosocial relevance; it’s simply a way to self-medicate. In other words, the motive is mostly a personal longing to be happier or, at least, less depressed and anxious—a motive legally justified as “medical.”

As it turns out, these legally sanctioned medications have proven to be no less dangerous than their illicit, recreational counterparts. The CDC’s National Vital Statistics data reveal that, despite a significant decline in illicit drug use, the number of overdoses in the U.S. between 1999 and 2007 doubled, putting fatal overdose second only to auto accidents as the leading cause of accidental death. Most of these overdoses were not due to illicit drug use but to prescription drug use among white, middle-class, non-urban women between the ages of 15 and 24 years. The National Center for Health Statistics reports a 467% increase between 1999 and 2005 in methadone-poisoning deaths. This correlates to a tremendous increase in methadone availability in tablet form through pharmacies. The CDC’s 2005 data reveal that antidepressants and painkillers are the most prescribed drugs in the nation.

Such legal medication generally does not serve the interests of recreation, curiosity or fun but delivers people from pain, loneliness and depression. Thus it would appear that post-modern drug use has turned away from third-world despair and embraced first-world medicine. This is not the culture of Scarface but of Brave New World—a brave new world much lonelier than Huxley’s. Soma, which possessed “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects,” was a social drug: “How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was!” Our industrial narcotics numb social sensitivity. They are prescribed to individuals in the strictest confidence by medical professionals and taken in isolation—an isolation increasingly prevalent in a world ostensibly more connected by technology.

Much has already been made of the 2006 data from the General Social Survey (GSS) showing that, compared to 1985, Americans have half as many people in their lives with whom they can discuss important personal matters and that 25% of Americans have no one at all in whom they can confide. If the average American, thanks to technological connectivity, is estimated to have more so-called friends than ever before, those friendships must be relatively superficial. I mean, one in four people out there, however technologically distracted, is personally isolated. Babbling on cell phones, plugged into IPods, idling in traffic, gazing at the pixels, medicated on antidepressants, they’re more like extras in a Sci-Fi dystopia than the cast of Drugstore Cowboy. The fear, loneliness, anger and anxiety against which increasing numbers of Americans drug themselves are not only symptoms of the loss of meaningful connections with others, they are the cause of that loss. In other words, industrially engineered drugs cause the very pain they are prescribed to kill and promise to contract, not expand, minds.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2009, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

What I really am is a guy who’s bugged by wastefulness. Being wasteful is mostly a way for people to demonstrate how careless, thus materially transcendent, they can afford to be. It only takes flying over an American suburb to see that, en masse, we are less about utility than superfluity. In my lifetime, at least, demonstrations of power and liberty in the form of excess have practically been a pledge of allegiance.

As a child of the 1970s, I remember the lines of cars at gas stations, siphoners in the parking lots, looking out of a plane over Los Angles and wondering, What’s all that brown stuff? (It was smog so thick you couldn’t see the ground.) The river near my home dried up and its salmon died off as redwood trees became redwood decks and tributaries became reservoirs. The Invisible Pyramid and Ecotopia were required high-school reading. There were anti-litter TV ads, one of which ended with a tear rolling down an Indian chief’s cheek. All this cultured me to assume that humanoids would eventually exhaust their resources and suffocate in their own shit like yeast in a fermenter. Consequently, I’ve come to regard wastefulness as chronic—a form of mass self-destruction due to a vanity incurable as it is human.

One thing for sure: wastefulness is the result of egotism and impulsiveness. It’s a byproduct our inherent capacity to abandon a collective future for a self-indulgent present. It’s due to that temporal myopia which trumps all regard for long-range, grand-scale consequences every second of the day. By the time those consequences ream our heretofore future asses, we’re no longer personally responsible—”Hell, it wasn’t anything I did.” It’s a fatal flaw as old as the Myth of the Fall, that exile from paradise which is basically the story of two people whose environment drastically changed due to their disregard of the admonition “thereof thou shalt surely die.” The fruit looked good, tasted good and was “to be desired to make one wise.” They ate, got high, got wise, got ashamed, and sacrificed a bountiful and hospitable place for an abject and deadly one.

I’d like to believe that the term green somehow addresses this fundamental human weakness and its contribution to our collective demise. However, as I sit on the bus and look out the window at people in their SUVs—isolated, stuck in traffic, spewing poison at 25 cents a minute—I ask, “Can they really change?” If exorbitance, impracticality and morbidity are not enough to dissuade them, something less sensible will have to persuade them. I mean, most of these SUV drivers couldn’t have passed through the so-called “Hummer loophole” (the Bush administration’s 2003 expansion of Section 179 of the U.S. tax code, which gave up to $100,000 write-offs for vehicles over 6,000 pounds that were used at least 50% for work purposes), so there was no material rationale for purchasing these trucks. Thus I believe the catalyst of change will have to be just as irrational; it will have to be about lifestyle, identity, coolness, vanity, and stimulate the heroic, reproductive urges of the species.

If there’s hope for me to become more than a bottle-hoarder, surely there’s hope for Americans to become more than a Black-Friday stampede of conspicuous prodigals. The hope is that, if not their intellect, at least their vanity can be harnessed to make them “green aware.” The audacity of this hope is already justified; you’d have to be oblivious not to notice that greenness has found its way into corporate seminars, dating services, clothing lines, vacation packages, and marketing and PR campaigns (”An oil company as part of the solution?”). In fact, greenness is so trendy that even the politician—that behind-the-curve popularity contestant—can’t afford to ignore it. Yes, the radiant future lies in harnessing vanity, myopia, selfishness and competitiveness to a big green horse.

If the green horse pulls us to the desired end—health, efficiency, prosperity—I won’t complain. I’ll just have to get over the fact that morbidity, wastefulness and disregard for the future were not enough to warrant change. And I will get over it. Hell, I’ve lived thus far in a world where irrational impulses triumph over rational solutions, haven’t I? Let them chant “Go green!” on Wednesday and “Drill baby drill!” on Friday. Their concerns for solving our domestic energy demands will never transcend their desire for cheap gas to power their alphamobiles. For they are human, and given a choice between immediate gratification and long-term sustainability, they’ll take the crack pipe every time.

Yes, I will survive this vast playground where what’s popular is popular because it’s popular. In the meantime, if I hesitate to use the word green, it’s not that I don’t advocate conservation and renewable-resource development; it’s just that I haven’t accustomed myself to trendy slogans promulgated by commercial and political interests. But I’m working on it. If being green is not to consist in an elevation of popular consciousness but a popular way of being “with it,” I can handle it. I can also handle a cooler planet.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2008, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

I wish now that I had immediately looked beyond Verizon. Why? Because, after that, Verizon became an obstacle—one that I couldn’t see around. I dialed, bounced through the menus again and held to ten minutes of what sounded like rodeo muzak. The next representative told me that I’d have to establish a new account, even thought I was only moving down the road. I didn’t protest.

Weeks rolled by and everything in my new home worked except my landline. I had no choice but to call Verizon and hold through Peter Frampton’s “I’m in You” and Norman Connor’s “You Are my Starship.” Then a service representative answered. I asked why my landline wasn’t working, and she told me that I wasn’t listed under the account they’d given me. I asked what I could do about it. The answer? Establish another account and wait two weeks—which I did. But I had a bone to pick; I’d waited in good faith on Verizon’s negligence. The obstacle had become a problem.

Two weeks went by and still no dial tone. I called Verizon and held through an orchestral rendition of The Ventures’ “Wipeout.” The person who answered wanted to know what my “issue” was. When I told her, she replied that there was no record of my name belonging to the account I’d established—she’d have to transfer me to billing. I held through the theme songs of Gilligan’s Island, Love American Style, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Dukes of Hazard, and Hawaii Five-O. After 30 minutes of superannuated television tunes, someone answered. I gave him my number. He said that I wasn’t listed under that number and there was probably something wrong with the line itself—he’d have to transfer me to a technician.

I held through another circle of schlock-rock hell before a guy in a truck—actually driving—answered. I told him my problem. He was puzzled. Why was I calling him? What could he do about it? He was a line repairman. Again, I called Verizon. After Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go,” someone picked up. I related all that had happened. Again the answer was that I’d have to establish a new account. I hung up and looked at the clock. It was almost 12:00 noon and I’d made my first call at 10:30 a.m. The problem was now a battle.

The next day I called the latest number Verizon issued me, just to see if it would ring. It did. A lady answered—a fatigued, annoyed lady. She told me that people were calling for me and she’d been trying to get Verizon to fix the problem. I steadied myself, took a deep breath and called Verizon again. The extended dance mix of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” Vangelis’s “Chariots of Fire” and Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” lubed my ear. Then someone answered. She asked for my number. I gave it. She asked for my social security number. I gave it. She said that Verizon’s new security policy required another verification of my identity.

“Security policy? The others didn’t ask these questions.”

“I’m sorry if others aren’t following Verizon’s security policy.”

“Okay, then, what do you need?”

She made thinking noises—”Um…eh…let’s see…er…eh…”—then asked the amount of my last bill.

“How am I supposed to remember that? I paid it over two months ago.”

“I’ll think of something else,” she said.

She thought.

Finally, she asked me what my previous address was. I passed Verizon’s security check. Then I stated my problem: “My account is someone else’s.”

“That’s impossible,” she said.

“It’s a fact.”

“How do you know?”

“I called the number and someone else answered—someone with a different name and address, someone who was tired of getting calls for me.”

She thought about that awhile and said, “The record states that it’s your number.”

“The record is wrong.”

“I’ll transfer you to billing.”

Before I could protest, I was listening to Neil Diamond’s “Forever in Blue Jeans,” Heat Wave’s “Always and Forever” and Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young.” The person who answered said that I’d have to establish a new account. I told her that I’d already done that—twice. She told me that it was all I could do. Overcome by frustration and futility, I went through with it.

Two weeks elapsed and I had ceased to believe that there would ever be a dial tone. And the mere thought of calling Verizon brought on waves dismay. But having invested so much time and psychic energy in trying to make it work, I couldn’t accept defeat. So I dialed. I made it through Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree,” The New Vaudeville Band’s “Winchester Cathedral” and Paul McCartney’s “Ebony and Ivory.” I had to take deep breaths and imagine myself looking down on the situation from a great height to lower my cortisol levels. Then someone answered. She wanted my number. I gave it. She wanted to know how she could help. I told her. There was a pause. She said that she’d have to transfer me to technical support. Barry Manilow crooned “I Write the Songs.”

A technical support representative suggested that I plug my phone into a box outside the house and listen for a dial tone—”So you’ll know whether the problem is inside or outside the house.” I took the phone out to the yard, opened the box and—no jack, just wires. It was an old-style box that Verizon hadn’t replaced since its days as Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone. I took out my cell phone and called Verizon. I felt like a codependent: desperate and willing, yet pissed-off and alienated. I got through Kenny Rogers’ “She Believes in Me.”

The person who answered was sitting in a Kentucky call center, had limited access to information but suggested that a technician come out and check the lines.

“Will it cost anything?” I asked.

“Only if the problem is inside the house.”

“How much?”

“Well, there’s a $45-dollar minimum service charge plus $80 dollars an hour for labor.”

“Forty-five bucks just to show up?”

“Yes.”

“Even if there’s nothing wrong?”

“Yes.” Then she read from a script: “Verizon’s incentive maintenance plan provides unlimited service in your home for just $3.99 a month—”

“You’re trying to sell me repair insurance?”

“I’ll sign you up right now.”

“Wait, I just need someone to come out and check the line. How long would that take?”

“Two weeks from today.”

I said nothing. My integrity, will and self-esteem were cavitating. I had the sensation of floating, spinning, grappling with something so high I couldn’t get over it, so low I couldn’t get under it, so wide I couldn’t get around it. It was a gigantic, formless polypus, no one cell of which was capable of coordinating with another.

“I’m sorry you’re having trouble.”

“I’m sorry you can’t help me. I’m sorry we’re sorry.”

But I wasn’t sorry; I was exasperated to resignation. I felt myself drifting away from the battle. I saw Verizon as an administrative Tower of Babel, adding layers of labor without regard to quality or efficiency. Like so many boardroom-driven entities (Microsoft, AOL, Google…), it had bloated into an uncoordinated Behemoth. Its collective aim was quantitative, to become more, to launch new features and acquire new market shares. And, because it was a monopoly, I had to buy into this dysfunctional surfeit. Or did I? Was Verizon a monopoly? I asked myself, Can I do without this beast?

The way became clear. The paradigm shifted. Instead of depending on Verizon, I would dump Verizon. I felt instant relief, like Sisyphus dropping his stone. I asked her to close the account and send me the final bill.

“If I were you, I’d wait for a technician,” she said.

“And get charged $45 bucks for nothing? Then have to call Verizon again to find out why my number still isn’t working? Forget it. Close the account. Close everything.”

Surprisingly, it was the swiftest and easiest transaction I’d conducted thus far. She made no attempt to retain me as a Verizon customer. It was done in a matter of seconds. Then I called the only other telephone company in my area, Cavalier, and, without musical interlude, set up a new account in five minutes. My phone was operable in a couple of days.

A Verizonless month flew by. Then the envelope arrived. I hefted it with abhorrence, knowing that the Behemoth had erred on the side of overcharge and, worse, I’d have to call again. True to form, they had charged me account connection fees, service fees, dial tone fees, taxes, and fees for a full set of features for every single account—operative or not—they had set up.

Though I was tempted to pay to avoid the pain, I could not pay for dysfunction. I could only hope that dumping Verizon would continue to be more effective than depending on it. So, for the last time in my life, I called Verizon. I listened to Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock,” Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes’s “Up Where We Belong,” and Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me.” Then someone spoke. Number? I gave it. Name? I gave it. Nature of the problem? Billed for accounts that weren’t operable.

“Can you hold while I consult my supervisor?”

“Sure.”

Amazingly, there was no music. She returned two minutes later, apologized for keeping me on hold, and informed me that my new balance was zero.

“Zero?”

“Yes, zero.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you for doing business with Verizon.”

After I hung up, I could hear that zero echoing into the sound of silence. The beast had set me free.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2008, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

The first thing a soldier must abandon is personal accountability. His personal choice in just about everything, down to when he eats, sleeps and shits, is either voided or replaced with a rule, regulation or guideline. He must be conditioned to act on command, without hesitation, doubt, or consideration of the options. The extremes required of him would not be supportable without this substitution of the personal with the compulsory. The soldier’s depersonalization is achieved by punishment—usually pain, privation, or public humiliation. The white-collar world, which prides itself on decorum and civility, achieves depersonalization by indirect punishments, such as letting the penitent stew in isolation. This withdrawing of attention, as opposed to applying it, is what pop-psychologists refer to as “passive aggression.” Really, it’s just a way of exploiting the natural human terror of being cut off from communal resources, of depriving a gregarious creature of the social feedback necessary to establish itself within the community. It is designed to leave you alone in the universe—or the jungle.

After signing up with my first temp agency, I soon discovered that this isolation took various forms, most notably the coveting and concealment of information. It began with the agency not revealing its intentions regarding prospective assignments, which always came out of the blue. The agency also concealed both its commission and its clients’ reports of my performance. Finally, I never knew whether an agency intended to assign me again, a withholding of information designed to delay my looking elsewhere. And never did an agency explicitly terminate our professional contract; whether I worked or not, I was—and, as far as I know, still am—ostensibly employed by these agencies.

Agency analysts would sometimes tell me that I was a “free agent,” a contractor working for myself. This was specious PR; I had no control over the contractual terms of my employment. Temps don’t set their own pay rates, negotiate with clients, set the agency’s commission or define the scope of their work. It is a lie to even suggest that temps have the decision-making power that the word freedom implies. The belief that they might be free, if pleasant, doesn’t alter the fact that the terms of their employment are completely under the agency’s control and the percentage of their earnings claimed by these staffing agencies far exceeds that of agency commissions in any other field.

At best, a temp’s decision-making power takes two forms: the power to accept or decline an assignment, and the power to switch to another agency. The latter usually happens when the temp has been “blacklisted” (unknowingly barred from future assignments, which is not uncommon) or motivated by better assignments at higher pay rates. Because agencies deny temps the freedom and information necessary to act in their own interest, temps have evolved stratagems to overcome this; they leverage one agency’s offerings against another’s, talk with people at their assignments to find out what their agencies will not tell them, and hire themselves out by undercutting their agency’s rates. However, a clause in their contract bars them from working for an agency client for at least 6 months after an assignment. The very existence of this clause indicates the degree to which agencies seek to professionally restrict temps, especially from the possibility of actually being free agents. If members of Congress are restricted from working as lobbyists for a year after they have left office, it is a justifiable (though ineffective) prohibition against the exploitation of public service for private gain. However, being a temp involves no such conflict of interest. Temps are prohibited simply because the agency wishes to retain its profits and its dispensable workforce.

Thus temps quickly learn to act in their own interest; they access and exploit information wherever possible. And this is as it should be. For agencies hoard information at their employees’ expense and offer no recompense for this imposed ignorance—no health insurance, no job security, no professional advancement, no sense of self-worth. Being disadvantaged and dispensable, temps rightly survive by dispelling the darkness that surrounds them. They often go into dysfunctional and politically treacherous workplaces, where, perceived as innocuous, disinterested drones, they hear things that more vested parties do not. As temps pretend to disinterested efficiency, so, perms, sensing them as posing no political threat, will sometimes enter into confidences with them. These perms usually grouse, which is to be hoped for. However, while such confidences are advantageous, they must not appear invited. Any overt show of allegiance to a grousing perm could draw fire from the latter’s enemies. A too interested temp can find the assignment cut short and the reason shrouded in secrecy.

Being kept from the truth is the hallmark of subordination. Higher-ups rarely reveal the geneses of the decisions that affect their subordinates. As in politics, so in the workplace: the consequences of the fait accomplit distract from its causes. Subordinates deal with what happens, not why it happens. When an assignment ends “earlier than expected,” experienced temps immediately get on the phone and make their availability known to the several other agencies. Whatever provisional rationales, apologies, or defenses an agency might give for ending an assignment early are likely only convenient, unassailable means to end the discussion. The true reasons may range from budget shortfalls to out-and-out dislike; however, if clients are under no obligation to give truthful answers to an agency, certainly an agency is no more compelled to be truthful to its employees. Anyhow, were the truth revealed, could the temp do anything about it? No. So it is best to act on the assumption that it’s over for good and move to the next agency.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2008, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

About a year ago I bought a gadget that uses wireless technology to play electronic files and Internet radio through my stereo. Not a mind-bending idea. Receivers and transmitters have been around for over a century—telephones, radios, televisions, etc. And these earlier manifestations of our rut toward technological utopia, when finally mass marketed, were fully operational. They were plug-it-in-and-turn-it-on retail products. They required only a limited degree of end-user manipulation—volume, channel, band, tuning—and fulfilled the promise of actually working when you purchased them. Remember?

My new toy, however, was state of the art. It had more in common with products that rely on computer technology: it had to be set up, programmed, updated—that is, fucked with for days on end in conjunction with my computer, router and internet connection before it worked at all. And, when it did work, it didn’t simply work; it crashed, seized up, and went blank whenever the gods pleased. After troubleshooting and reading product forums, I’d usually find out that it was my fault: I hadn’t downloaded the weekly firmware rebuild, reprogrammed the settings, downloaded the latest version of the server software, etc… And when the crashes and freezes and blackouts continued, the cause was beyond the technical grasp of the manufacturer (still my fault). It reminded me of those toys you see advertised to children at Christmastime, the ones that turn out to be nothing but trays of molded-plastic parts—the ones that promise completion, yet arrive broken and stay broken.

During one of my troubleshooting marathons, standing there holding a remote about as useful as my dick, a certain scene from “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut” popped into mind. That sketch where the Army General says, “You told us that windows 98 would be faster and more efficient, with better access to the internet!” And Bill Gates, nodding with placating hand gestures, replies in his signature complacent tone (his actual voice), “It is faster. Over five million—” Whereupon the General pulls out his gun and puts a bullet through Bill’s head. It was an almost orgasmic collision of worlds—the world that expects you not only to accept its dysfunctional products but to interest yourself in their technical fine points, and the world that just wants them to work. It was a moment where art imitated reality up to a point, then improved on it. The reality is you paying for shit that’s supposed to work and is unequivocally fucked up, then being made to feel incapable by some ether-toned circuit nerd; the improvement is you, the customer, holding this Spock idolater accountable not only for his wormy product but the false assumption that you ought to give a steaming yam about how it works.

Is it because our society is so dependent on technology to conduct business, interact and jack off that the tech industry so readily kicks its incompetency down to its customers? You’d think that where machines are necessary and in high demand their functionality would be as well. But the tech market is like no other in its exceptional exemption from functional accountability. Take the Windows operating system, for example. It’s been in an incomplete, broken-out-of-the-box condition for what, a few decades? By far the most robust version of this mortal-man-hours vampire was the 3.x, which didn’t allow two applications to run at once and sat on top of DOS. Since that time, Windows has been unsafe, unstable and inconceivably demanding. Yet it hath prevailed. Why?

Part of it is due to Microsoft’s “business practices,” which have characterized the company since the day it got its name. Another part is that tech culture has become a part of consumer culture, resulting in an expectation that the people working with computers should be working on them. By culture I don’t simply mean wire-rimmed glasses and combed-forward hair parted as far to the left as humanly possible—Gates’s yachty and slightly sebacious dishevelment. I mean the vapid enthusiasm for things computer related: the awe of being in the presence of gibberish that passes for higher cognition (acronyms out of the Popular Electronics lexis); the fetishizing of equipment; the unquestioned acceptance of extensive end-user labor, as if having to work for hours a day to fix a machine were not only required but the ideal state of things. Ask yourself, if it takes a week to get Windows running and a day to repair the washing machine, what compels you to fix Windows and call a repairman for the washer? Why do we consider the washer something to have fixed and Windows something to be figured out? Becasue, if it has to do with computers, problems somehow belong to the user, not to the manufacturer. Here’s another way to look at it: if we were to spend as much time on our plumbing as we do our computers, we’d be certified master plumbers earning $200 an hour—so why are we office workers earning $20 an hour?

Because plumbing is trade labor and computer work supposedly transcends labor. It has white-collar clout. As if a series of positive and negative magnetic charges were not a mechanical phenomenon. I mean, sure, computers have changed the work process, but not the work product: writing still has to entertain and inform. Imagine a like degree mechanical hassle being kicked down to the purchaser of a car: “Your Ford Explorer is ready, Mr. Denzert. Don’t forget to adjust the points before installing the spark plugs. I think you can find a distributor cap at the parts store down the street, but maybe not. The break pads will need to be upgraded if you plan on doing much city driving. As for the fuses that run the dashboard circuitry, we’re in the process of upgrading them. The ones in there now might last a few hundred miles. And don’t forget to come back in a month for the improved tires. The ones you’ve got on there now could disintegrate if you push it over seventy. We’ll also be shipping you a new gear for the transmission in several months. Be sure to download instructions on how to install it.”

Part of the reason computer users are expected to become their own mechanics is that information technology is not considered mechanical. Another reason is that the do-it-yourself, garage entrepreneurialism for which this young industry is famous is considered a virtue. For the last half a century, America has been one big geek fest of model rockets, chemistry sets, Erector Sets and RadioShacks. It’s just one of those vestigial preoccupations of the pioneering spirit, deriving from the sensibility that a man ought to be his own engineer, mechanic, dentist, and barber. Being your own inventor, builder and businessman is as American as Ben Franklin’s crooked bangs and Thomas Jefferson’s wall clock. In short, computer culture is both a product and a symbol of two admired national traits: autonomy and ingenuity. The Bill Gates story is the Andrew Carnegie is the Henry Ford is the Philo Farnsworth story. It’s the story that compels us to sit at workstations re-enacting the American nativity scene for hours a day. And as long as the every-man-his-own-mechanic myth prevails, we’ll continue to spend a tenth of our lives in servitude to these dysfunctional gadgets.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2007, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

The primary means of the change in porn has always been proper to the graphic media: exclusion and exaggeration. By “graphic media” I mean media that depend on visual presentation for their effect. It follows that such media would eliminate distractions from, and focus on, the subject. In porn the subject is the physical operations of sex and the erotic state, and even the earliest forms of porn visually isolated and exaggerated these. Take, for instance, those enormous, elaborately labiated and plicated vulvas and phalluses in the shunga prints of 18th- and 19th-century Japan. Note the expressions of the characters—the men’s frowns of determined assertiveness and the women’s gazes of rhapsodic abandon. These depictions are erotic precisely because they hyperbolize the genital activity and erotic state of the subjects. In contrast, illustrations of human genitalia in medical texts depict neither erotic response nor erotic experience. They have no intention to arouse and they don’t. Pornographers have long understood—some consciously, some instinctively—that the anticipated euphoria of sex is itself an exaggeration. Thus porn, as it evolves, assimilates sexual motivation (prospective pleasure) and discards the sexual turn-off (reality). And this is why porn, which is pro-erotic, is so often absurd.

Anyone who is familiar with porn has likely realized that porn doesn’t replicate sexual reality but exaggerates sexual experience—excludes what does not sexually excite and maximizes what does. The physiological and psychological complications of sex are, therefore, conspicuously absent from porn. Real sex, rife as it is with emotional and medical complications, dulled as it is by domestic habit and physical logistics, is rarely as easy and carefree as it is in porn. Porn almost programmatically omits boredom, anxiety, insecurity, revulsion, disease, pregnancy—all the non-erotic aspects of sex. Baudelaire claimed that “art flees the details.” Well, porn flees reality.

This distillation of the erotic, to the exclusion of the non-erotic, is exactly what distinguishes porn as a genre. In fact, porn could be characterized as a ludicrous eromania. That’s why it leaves you with that “as if” feeling, the sense that what you’ve seen is indeed possible, but absurd. Aristotle says in his Poetics, “With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible.” Porn suffers from a paucity of artistic integrity because it presents something possible and common (sex) in a ridiculously improbable way. By stripping sex of its attendant complexity and amplifying what’s left, porn ends up, unapologetically, being something quite other than a representation of real sex. It does what maniacs do—inflates a particular into an entirety.

Though porn has always focused on the sex act, today’s porn product takes this exclusion and exaggeration to an obsessive degree. This is evident when one compares contemporary porn to that of the 1970s, the “golden age” of pornographic film. In the current product, the dramatic and technical requirements of the feature film have been replaced by sustained, zoomed-in, genital action. The drama-sex ratio has diminished to nil on the drama side. The pornographic portrayal of sexual experience has abdicated ideas and sentiments of any kind, even those relevant to sex. Its conceptual locus has atrophied into explicit sexual exertion. If actual sex eventuates from a complex of thoughts, feelings and negotiations, pornographic sex is nothing but the acrobatics of gratification.

On the ideological level, 1970s porn treated sex as something that had social and political significance. It was a time when sex was associated with freedom from social strictures and authority, when “swingers” were adventurous progressives who regarded sexual expression as a form of active rebellion against an inhibitive status quo. This early porn often had liberation via the breaking of taboos as its subject. Sex happened the way it does in Chuck Norris films: situation (setup), dialogue (rationale), and action (reward). In Behind the Green Door it takes almost 20 minutes for the sex to get underway. In Taboo, much of the time is spent situating characters according to plot and negotiating the controversial topic, incest. In today’s porn all such discussion and drama is an unnecessary pretext (as it is in Marquis de Sade’s books). And how does today’s porn consumer react to it? “Deliver the groceries already!”

Another typical characteristic of the present-day porn is the physical “perfection” of its stars. Stars of the golden age, like Kay Parker, were not physically exceptional. Miss Parker, the most renowned porn star of her time, had an ordinariness of appearance and plausibility as a real woman in her mid-thirties: mature facial features, pubic hair, laxity of flesh, pallor of indoor living, etc. Today’s most renowned porn star, Jenna Jameson, has the body of a 20-year-old and the face of a 10-year-old. Her breasts look like they’re about to explode. Depilated from nose to toes, she has the muscle tone of a panther and the teeth of a barracuda. She’s like something out of the pages of Heavy Metal—a cartoon. Most of today’s mainstream porn is populated by these baby-faced Amazons and Muscle Beach Tarzans. And the commingling of their fantastical physiques is more athletic than sexual, void as it is of the visual vocabulary of real sex, which is full of strange and not always savory detail.

And note the improbable sustain and variety of techniques. While few would want to admit that they have boring sex, if they were to base their sexual expectations on the extended gymnastic performances in the current porn, they would feel boring. Back when porn was more or less marginalized, pornographic sex was more like actual sex. The camera usually stood where the voyeur would stand (at the foot of the bed), capturing the relatively vanilla spectacle of two people fucking. The sex in films like Taboo consists mostly of vaginal penetration and fellatio. In the current product, however, the positions and acts are extraordinarily various and the aspect of the viewer is almost entirely focused, from a variety of angles, on the active organs. A current porn film can dedicate a quarter of an hour to a squirting vulva and its adjacent anus, alternately penetrated by tongues, penises, dildos and gloved hands. The degree of exposure is absurd and includes views of the internal tissues of the vagina and rectum, not to mention play with secretions and ejaculations. Nowadays the sexuality of which porn is expressive is so hyperbolically focused that it provides far more graphic imagery than real sex ever could.

For a long while now the majority of porn actors have shaved their genitals bare. This evolution to hairlessness reveals something about the objectives of porn. First, hairlessness is suggestive of youth. Obviously, young adults are more physically appealing and capable of sustained sexual activity. Additionally, youth lacks experience and is, therefore, less precautionary and inhibited—relatively free of the ties and practical responsibilities that put a damper on libertinage. Combine looks, vigor, ignorance and freedom and you have the most viable candidate for gratuitous sex, or sex for sex’s sake, which is all that pornographic sex is.

Hair is also a banner for biology. It shows that we’re animals and suggests our subjection to biological imperatives and limitations. Not only does hair remind us that we are ruled by nature, it reminds us of our mortal weaknesses. Porn consumers do not want to be reminded of biology—of birth, death, hunger, illness. Morbid thoughts of aging, disease and childbearing are not conducive to carefree erotic indulgence. So, by getting rid of pubic hair, porn has omitted a host of unpalatable biological associations.

If porn has purged itself of art, drama, ideology, biology, controversy and sentimentality, it has evolved into exactly what its audience wants. It is now like a Chuck Norris film that is all fight and no facile narrative, shallow characterization, moral platitude or bestial mustache. The state of today’s porn is a de facto assertion that accusations of pornography being nothing but a rude visual stimulant for people who need an escape from reality are correct. This raises the question: should porn try to be anything else? It would appear that when people want ideas and drama they go to art. When they want real sex, they make romance and negotiate consent. When they want stability and dedication, they get married. In fact, none of our civilized conventions are invalidated or rendered inaccessible on porn’s account. Meanwhile, people want porn, and they want it downright pornographic.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2006, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

Reluctant as I am to plead ignorance on behalf of the cell people, I’m left with no choice. Choice went out the window the moment the distorted midi-tone of “In Da Club” sounded. From that moment, obliviousness for the sake of talk set in, or whatever you’d call it—disregard, heedlessness, disrespect… Whatever it is, it’s immune to censure. It serves as its own defense. Any attempt to staunch it by speaking up bites you back, because no matter how heavily laced the speech be with phalluses, orifices and the gymnastics that conjoin them, interruption is rude.

If we, the other seventy-five percent of riders, could aptly punish the cell people, it would have to be something along the lines suggested by a certain episode of This American Life, titled “Telephone” (January 16, 1998). It’s about a teenager whose father, exasperated by his son’s bong-fogged descent into thieving, lying, and flunky self-oblivion, secretly tapes his kid’s phone conversations. When the kid finally discovers the setup, his dad hands over the tapes. On listening to his own cringe-inducing demonstrations of ignorance, selfishness and vanity, he’s inspired a la Glen Campbell’s eternal lyric (taken from train-station graffiti), “Think a little more of others and a little less of me.” Perhaps the young man whose “crazy-ass bitch be fuckin’ Shafon” should have to listen to himself, say, for an hour (any longer would be cruel and unusual). As King George, Dick Mephistopheles, Karl Beelzebub and colleagues have all our phone conversations digitally archived, it wouldn’t be difficult to make these available to local authorities.

The reason the above punishment is so apt is that the offenses of the cell people involve a feature of immaturity: lack of awareness. The cell people juvenesce the second they connect. Sure, babies cry, urinate and defecate, kids have a hairy over the Brontastic Avenger at the bottom of the Captain Crunch box, teenagers sport a neck-to-kneecap T-shirt with a machine-gun-flourishing drug lord on it; but we excuse their naiveté and inexperience. We trust that one day a reflective capacity will develop and they’ll ask that profound and fundamental question, “Am I an asshole?” Our trust, however, fails us when it comes to a 250-pound, sebaceous, hairy, musk ape that can ejaculate at will. Come to think of it, fuck trust—we expect him to compensate for his post-pubic repulsiveness with a bit of perspicacity. If he fails, it matters not whether his obliviousness can be attributed to a V600TX-Y Blue-Tooth 1.3-megapixel 3G streaming video MP3/AAC audio blah blah blah…

When I hear the technologically impaired cell people, I often feel as if the obscene voices and whimsies that adults do their damndest to keep from public exposure were parading before my ears. Perhaps, being distracted, they feel liberated from social censure—free to express the inner imp. Or maybe they simply can’t pay attention to two things at once. The effect, however, is that they add to the general load of impishness that we would all like to escape.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2006, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

Like so much of what conservatives proclaim in the media, the comment was not a truth but a cluster of associations around an opinion. These associations—failure and social policy, people and product, etc—intended to attribute America’s ills to liberal policymakers, of course. But the comment also reaffirmed something conservatives do believe: that social policy—policy which focuses on public instead of private interests—fails because it fosters dependency. It reaffirmed the falsehood that programs such as Social Security, Welfare, Medicare and Medicaid, which attempt to address social conditions, worsen what they intend to ameliorate. With respect to the poor and disenfranchised, conservatives believe that no help is better than any help at all. In their view, poverty is either a stimulus to self-betterment or a comeuppance for weakness of character, depending on the individual; they see it as a behavior, not a condition. It is, therefore, not the government’s business to give handouts to individuals who choose to be impoverished, right?

Now that the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government are controlled by conservatives, these beliefs have come out of the closet, so to speak. Conservatives have reached the point of expressing open disregard—as Lindberg does—of the lower classes. Barbara Bush’s stadium blooper—”Many of these people are underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them,”—expressed a similar classist attitude. It went so far as to imply that life on the stadium floor in a state of destitution, homelessness and bereavement was a step up from a previously underprivileged condition. Note her use of the dismissive anyway as well, as to suggest that nothing could be worse than being underprivileged. Lastly, her use of the word underprivileged suggests that her sense of being poor is not so much a matter of money, but of privilege.

The word privilege is significant. It derives from the Latin noun privelegium, which is a compound of privus (private) and legius (law). In ancient Rome a privelegium was a law in favor of, or against, a private individual. Since it passed into English, it has come to mean “a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage or favor” (Webster’s Third). Yet it carries some of its original meaning in the sense that the privileged are individuals who enjoy immunity and favor with respect to the law. Indeed, those who took refuge in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster (lower- and working-class folks) do not enjoy the legal immunity of the Bush Dynasty and colleagues.

Not only do the privileged enjoy legal immunity, they legislate. The privileged have strong interests in the courts and the highest levels of government, where they actively oppose social policies that would extend their privilege to other classes. But this isn’t surprising. Such an extension would only leave them less exceptional, advantaged and immune. There is no reason why America’s privileged should do anything but defend the policies and laws that bestow and protect their privilege. What is surprising is that those harmed and disadvantaged by these policies and laws do not fight back.

Recently, the Bush Administration nixed college loan money from the Federal budget. Ostensibly, this was to reduce government spending. But college loan money is a small fraction of overall government spending. It is also money paid back with interest. This government service doesn’t greatly affect the budget; if anything, low-interest college loans eventually generate more middle-class, white-collar tax revenue. What this cut actually does is prevent the underprivileged classes from accessing higher education and influencing the laws and legislature of this country. Cutting student loan money isn’t a monetary strategy, it’s a sociopolitical strategy. It’s a defense and reinforcement of privilege against the education of those who would naturally oppose a privilege-based society. So, again, why didn’t this cut at least provoke a declaration of class war?

I know, the term class war seems incendiary and overdramatic. But let’s look at the reality of class stratification in America. Since 1980, the number of undocumented people living in this country has increased fivefold to 11 million. The number of people incarcerated has also increased fivefold to 10 million. That’s already a total of 21 million people (7% of the total U.S. population) who have no vote, no legislative representation. Lastly, 13% of the population continues to live below the poverty line and suffer a de facto exclusion from legal and political influence. In sum, approximately 20% of the U.S. population is undocumented, imprisoned or impoverished—or, in dynastic terms, underprivileged.

Meanwhile, conservative policies continue to abet this stratification. Immigration policies that would institute long-term detention centers for illegal aliens and 5-year prison sentences for anybody assisting an undocumented worker (see HR 4437); mandatory prison sentences for victimless crimes such as minor drug offenses; tax cuts, wars and economic policies designed to concentrate and secure the Nation’s wealth at the top 5% income levels… Instead of a reprisal by those who are victimized by these insidious policies, we have what looks like widespread consent. Yes, amazingly, many of those hurt by these policies actually vote for them.

The academic explanations abound. Dr. Arlie Hochschild attributes it to the “chauffeur’s dilemma” (The Chauffeur’s Dilemma, The American Prospect, vol. 16, no. 7), an analogy of behavior wherein a chauffeur, told to pull over, witnesses his boss tear bread out of a starving person’s hands and, when told to drive away, consents. Professor Lakov (Moral Politics) attributes it to the appeal of the conservatives’ “strict-father morality,” that firm, punitive, moral authority which attracts people to the promise of stability and security. However, like so many theories, these are more theoretical than evident. The question, for instance, as to why half of blue-collar American men supported the Bush tax cuts—why those making less than $30,000 consented to give 52% of the cut to the top 1% of Americans—must have a more obvious answer. I’ll try one: policymakers incessantly tell the lower and working classes that these policies will benefit them, and many of these folks believe what they’re told.

It goes without saying that the way in which politicians address the public affects public opinion. Our Emperor peppers his national addresses with Orwellian phrases like “working for the American people” and “protecting the American people,” not because he has an interest in doing either, but because he has to sell his policies to over 50% of the American public. He’s walking a tightrope, you see, between the popular support essential to his efficacy and that of the tycoons who fund his campaigns. These two interests are at odds, which makes it a difficult balancing act. However, he keeps his balance by giving each party its due: he feeds the public reassuring words and gestures of patriotism, morality, steadfastness and hard work, and gives the tycoons their remittance in the form of deregulation, federal contracts and tax cuts.

On the Democratic side of the coin there is the rhetoric of care and unity. For instance, Barack Obama’s address at the 2004 Democratic Convention was based on the premise that we all have an overarching common interest (we’re all Americans) and should therefore transcend our differences. While this “one nation under God” patriotic platitude inspired and pacified some, it obscured a basic truth: for the past third of a century policymakers have served private, not public, interests, to the effect that we now live in a country divided by those who can afford political power and those who can’t.

Sure, words are influential. But deeds are factual. It is a fact that the lower and working classes of this country are not served by the legislators of this country. The aftermath of hurricane Katrina made this obnoxiously evident—it produced undeniable proof of a gross divide between those whom the laws serve and those whom they do not. Meanwhile, the political discourse is not going there. Conservatives talk about war and hard work; liberals talk about unity and care. The fact is, most Americans are warring for a lie, working for a pittance, uniting with the void, caring for soi-même and eating too many freedom fries.

So, to state the obvious and risk repetitiousness, the underprivileged simply have no legislative representation in this country. Neither Tweedle-Democrat nor Tweedle-Republican offers them a coherent advocacy. I’m not talking about “My daddy was a mill worker” speechifying, that hollow advertisement for the American Dream, that false promise of prosperity, that vain self-exemplification intended to garner votes. Though some Americans do cast aspiration votes, most Americans do not rise from the working class to become rich trial lawyers or anything approximating rich.

In a democracy, politicians are people who barter popularity for power. If the rhetoric that makes them popular (in this case, that of God, morality, war, freedom, prosperity, unity, etc) fails to address the truth, it is largely the fault of a gullible populace. Not that people wouldn’t opt for the truth if it were “out there.” However, all they’re given is a distracting, cynical rhetoric urging support for policies that are in fact against their interests. As long as poor and working-class citizens have no leader with a language and course of action that respects the truth of the conditions in which they live, the answer to the question “Class war?” will continue to be “Not yet.”

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2006, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

There’s a similar joke in the film Deconstructing Harry—the scene where Harry Block (Woody Allen) dreams that his friend (Billy Crystal), as Satan, is giving him a tour of Hell. Passing the lowest circle, Block asks who’s condemned there. Satan replies, “The inventor of aluminum siding.” It employs the same bathos (severe to trivial) and comic reversal (personal to public), with religious authority as the punitive institution. It also suggests that, while it’s hyperbole to say that bad taste deserves a fate worse than death, bad taste is not only punishable but punished.

The only reason the dictates of taste appear free and easy is that most people take them for granted. From the age they become fashion conscious, they condemn their less–fashion-conscious peers, casting them into respectively lower ranks of the social order (Hell). As they mature, they learn to pretend that they have tamed this punitive instinct and, unlike schoolchildren, are quite sociable, tolerant, understanding. But they’ve only learned to dissimulate this invidious comparison and, despite appearances, continue to compete in matters that require even the most shallow and immediate judgment, like fashion. The popular (preferred) embodiment of taste as the dancing, IPod-plugged ragamuffin in the grips of Dionysian ecstasy doesn’t jive with the fact that, both personally and socially, taste is under more stringent censorship than almost any other aspect of our existence.

Empirican politicians take the idea of liberty very seriously. They point condemning fingers at theocracies that force women to wear body tents and social democracies that prohibit religious dress in schools. Yet they legislate to prohibit teenagers from showing a couple of inches of underwear between pants and shirt, and mandate the pledge of allegiance and prayer in schools. This sort of liberty looks more like hypocrisy, bigotry and self-righteous morality—the sort of liberty satirized in the Randy Newman song “Political Science.”

Many of these so-called “public servants” consider laissez-faire capitalism to be synonymous with liberty. However, like the idolaters of the pig’s head in Lord of the Flies (here a mutant cross between Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand and Adam Smith), these free-market ideologues would actually replace all public institutions with private ones. It is hard to say whether their belief in the tenability of a free-market El Dorado is due to naiveté with regard to human nature, historical ignorance or self-destructive optimism. For the society that forsakes its public institutions for profit-only interests lapses to the rule of brute force and blind faith. The HBO series Deadwood portrays just such a prospect and concludes, as history repeatedly has, that the “invisible hand” is neither gentle nor tenable and soon cedes to the hand of law and order. As business precedes law in the evolution of human society, there are many examples of the state in which lawless, business-only societies must briefly exist—one of physical oppression and mental darkness (barbarism).

The same ignorance which renders barbarians incapable of conceiving or embracing the useful restraints of laws exposes them naked and unarmed to the blind terrors of superstition.

—Edward Gibbon

In the last decade, the ideology of total privatization and the mass superstition of evangelical Christianity have become preponderant conservative political influences. While this has served to emancipate the uber rich and powerful from the rule of law, it has left most Empiricans with a limited freedom to sell goods (market), buy goods (consume), flaunt goods (compete) and attribute supernatural causes to the conditions in which they live. Their prosperity is gauged not by quality of life, which includes education and health, but “consumer confidence,” which is solely their willingness to unconditionally spend. Business-only politics has left them a government of two parties, the jackass and the mammoth—the one with more money, hence power to engineer public opinion, the other with almost as much money, hence the power to prop up an illusion of choice—both “incentivised” (bought out) by corporate lobbies.

Mass religion has always had the politically expedient effect of supplanting doubt with faith, reason with belief, judgment with feeling and fact with fable. Presently, we find individual decision in matters ethical, esthetic and political less fashionable than it was decades ago. The cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, which advocated freedom in almost everything—dress, sexuality, work, speech, leisure—ceded to luxury. Individualism and what religious conservatives refer to as “the culture of relativism” are now inconvenient. Too much of the outward manifestation looks like chaos and self-indulgence; too much of the inward manifestation looks like pop superstition and effete analysis. Consciously or not, Empiricans now prefer conformity and consent, which are nicer, neater, firmer. These come preapproved and therefore induce less distress, error and conflict. They also come with less invention, genius and general intelligence. Nostalgia for a culture that was more progressive, expressive, inventive and better educated has become entertainment (e.g., some wacky-days-of-yore show or rockumentary). Not to say that the present boy-next-door society doesn’t have its geniuses, inventors, intellectuals and artists; just to say that they have ceased to matter. They have careers, not causes, to worry about.

There will always be those who find appearance arbitrary, yet have a natural thirst for things intellectual, esthetic and spiritual—who believe, with Seneca, that “Inwardly everything should be different but our outward appearance should conform with the crowd.” But where the signs of progress cease to manifest, progressive ideas have ceased to influence. Not that there is anything wrong with stability and conformity per se. But these without consciousness are harmful. These confused with liberty and a will to defend them against, and impose them on, the rest of the world too often result in a consolidation of public opinion behind destructive policy.

The drinker who thinks he’s sober drinks until he does something unconscionable or passes out. The responsible drinker knows he’s drunk. Unfortunately, Empirica doesn’t know it’s drunk. It still believes that it’s the freest place on earth. Why? Because its citizens can buy the same polo shirt in five colors, walk down a supermarket aisle filled with five brands of cereal, buy coffee at one of five neighborhood Starbucks, buy one of five cars that all look like a Jeep Cherokee, and watch one of five network channels that all air the same lobotomized news. Which brings to mind another gag in Woody Allen’s excellent satire: Block’s clarification to a prostitute that he doesn’t want to be beaten, blown and tied, or blown, tied and beaten, but tied, beaten and blown.

What Empiricans actually have is something easier and more comfortable than liberty; they have a belief in liberty. So far, that’s been enough to compel them to tack Old Glory to their homes, bodies and automobiles, burn oil like it’s going out of style, eat more pizza, pray to their God and produce an extended dance version of the National Anthem. It has not, however, kept them from becoming an increasingly homogeneous society that, in its naive belief in liberty, has goose-stepped into the biggest error in its history, barring slavery.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

Unfortunately, the lie was one that I sometimes believed. Yes, there were jobs at which I felt as if I were personally and practically valued. But a call from the agency marking the end of my assignment would soon enough obliterate such feelings and almost always leave me disillusioned and confused.

Eventually I learned to fortify myself against delusions of personal worth and public utility. This wasn’t too difficult, as a few times a day I’d hear myself referred to as “the temp,” the term that replaced my name whenever permanent employees (perms) referred to me in the third person. I came to recognize that they had no reason to refer to me as an individual. They knew I’d be gone in a week or a month and all efforts to bond were a waste. Who wants to invest time and energy in a relationship that doesn’t and won’t matter? So we mutually precluded the language of camaraderie, as prostitution precludes that of domesticity. Yet, like johns, the perms would sometimes confide in me, as my powerlessness and insignificance inspired a degree of liberty.

Eventually I objectified them. They were chumps in a sitcom that lasted from 8 AM to 5 PM. I’d overhear accounts of their extraprofessional adventures together, which management never discouraged—”It builds relationships, unites the team.” A group of them would go to a ball game or out drinking. Someone would yak buffalo wings in the ficus pot. The next day there’d be yuckety-yuks—talk among everybody but the temps. It was tacitly understood that perms should not build relationships with temps. Sure, some made a genuine effort to be friendly, but they could never be trusted allies. Whenever they had to account for their inefficacy, a temp was the scapegoat. The result was that a series of temps would sometimes pass through the same assignment. These temps suffered termination in turn at virtually no cost to the buck-passing perms. Naturally, such perms made enemies of these temps. But is a powerless and invisible enemy really an enemy? Or just someone, somewhere, holding a grudge to no effect?

As temps have none of the practical benefits of a permanent job—neither salary, paid vacations, benefits, professional alliances, specialized training nor vested interests—why should they have any of the social benefits? Their role as outsiders is not existential drama; it’s a circumstance. Impermanence insinuates itself into all their work relations. They know that the comrade of today is the incognito of yesterday and tomorrow. This, of course, is not entirely disadvantageous. Isolation sharpens their powers of observation. They have to learn things with a minimum of background and a maximum of applied reason. They have to peg people on immediate evidence and deal with them professionally. They are operatives, really, nothing more. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, they do a job and disappear. In my own experience, I most respected those who understood this and treated me as such.

As most companies contract temps when workloads are supposedly too much for the perms to handle, temps tend to see a lot of understaffed or, more often, poorly managed offices. I hated getting new assignments at big companies as it was likely I’d end up in a badly managed office where a number of small, necessary, ongoing functions would be shunted to temps. These functions were mostly petty tasks—copying, filing, formatting, distribution, etc.—requiring a minimum of skill and commanding the least prestige. The perms in such offices had learned to push these tasks onto temps because they preferred not to, or would not learn how to, do what would have taken less time to execute than delegate. Prejudice regarding what was above or below their professional stature was common. When I started working as a temp, I could immediately tell that a place was mismanaged by the variety and insignificance of the tasks. It seemed that management had granted its staff an underling more out of benevolence than necessity.

In such places the workload was practically nil. However, I found that if I finished work too quickly my only reward was more work or a decision to do without me. It didn’t take long to realize that a temp shouldn’t overperform. A temp should ask for a turnaround time at the outset and hand back the work a bit before that. And if the task only takes two minutes? Should the temp say, “Hey, this’ll only take two minutes. Anything else I can do?” Hell no. First, perms don’t want to be bothered with the knowledge that management is wasting money, as they’re usually powerless to do anything about it. Second, downtime is the only payback temps get, and the only way they get downtime is by keeping perms in the dark. Third, temp agencies profit by prolonged assignments, so finishing quickly and thereby becoming obsolete is not, shall I say, rewarded.

Among temps, common circumstances result in confidences. I can say with certainty that I never met one who didn’t engage in payback—that is, who didn’t take home office supplies and/or profit from downtime. I met temps who went to work with empty briefcases and left with full ones. I met temps who pursued their own interests all the livelong day. One ran a record label, another edited a lit mag, another plowed through the works of all the major American playwrights. On most assignments I worked less than 50% of the time and on some as little as 5%. I sometimes found myself in departments where five or six temps were ducking in cubicles pretending to be busy. Like all petty pilferers, they had a rationale: half of their rightful income was siphoned off by the agency and their actual employers had no responsibility toward them. They had no bargaining power with any of the parties involved and none of the benefits of autonomy. They were a species of human tool and quite conscious of it. So, like most people who are conscious of being exploited, they had their underhanded revenge.

Among the temps I encountered there were two distinct types: job shoppers and day jobbers. Job shoppers were temps who, looking for permanent positions, used temping as a way to jockey into favor. Day jobbers had alternative careers that didn’t pay enough to keep them afloat (e.g., writer, musician, herbalist, Olympic athlete, etc.). Day jobbers tended to be less subservient, thus more resilient. Their sense of self-worth was not staked on the way they made money. Job shoppers, however, tended to be obsequious and gregarious in order to insinuate themselves into positions of permanency. They used their downtime to schmooze. They could not be trusted.

I remember how one of my agency consultants tried to convince me that I was self-employed and therefore should take pride in my so-called autonomy. The spinmeister knew as well as I that being a temp was nothing to take pride in. My autonomy and individuality were suppressed by the inherent demands of the job. No one employs a temp on account of character or personality. Temps are operatives with a skill set. More than any other type of worker, they are all that is suggested by the term human resource: labor to be used up or stored up, to be tapped when demand exceeds supply and kept in reserve when supply exceeds demand. They are corporate management’s ideal labor force: a quantifiable resource. As a temp it was best, therefore, never to loose touch with that fact and act accordingly, payback included. For, as all exploited and powerless people know, what Shylock in the Merchant of Venice says is true: “You take my life/when you do take the means whereby I live.”

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

Again (as we seem to forget), Reagan gutted the public infrastructure to channel tax money into the military, corporations and interest on the biggest debt in human history. The first Bush Administration blithely and unimaginatively (hereditary) proponed and prolonged Reagan’s dysfunctional fiscal policy, or lack thereof, and big-government deficit spending became the actual practice of the anti–big-government party, despite its fiscal-discipline propaganda. Public money flew to industry cronies, redundant nuclear (noo•klee•er) annihilation, splendid little wars, coups and insurgencies against popularly elected governments, galactic ray guns that didn’t work, supermax penitentiaries, the War on What’s Immoral and, of course, interest on the ballooning national debt. It was public money the public never saw again. Otherwise, then as now, wealth stratified to those who didn’t need it and wouldn’t spend it (except in the form of campaign contributions).

The effect on everyday life was manifest. Unemployment went through the roof. Urban centers mired in crime. Empirica, in all its martial might, became one of the least-educated and most dangerous countries in the world. On the city streets AIDS and the crack wars raged. Violence, both other- and self-inflicted, was a way of life. Insane asylums and old folks homes vomited their patients into the streets. Drug- and alcohol-addled vagrancy was part of the view. And the Rodney King riots punctuated a good run for the GOP. In the midst of all this, lots of people were living in genteel poverty—specifically, graduate-educated twenty-somethings with no white-collar job experience, who’d been working in small businesses since they’d left school and surviving on $5 to $8 an hour by virtue of the fact that in those hip but crime-ridden neighborhoods life was cheap.

Then came the ‘92 presidential election and the thinking was, please, God, not another republican. Because, then as now, republican fiscal policy was privatization (cronyism), republican foreign policy was militarism (global profiteering), and republican domestic policy was PR (propaganda). So a democrat was elected and the economy began to recover. Crime and unemployment decreased, rents increased and genteelly impoverished twenty-somethings had to make more than $10 an hour to survive. Under this imperative many of us joined the white-collar industrial revolution that transformed desks into workstations and offices into places where people sat at computers all day. We recognized that to make money we’d have to learn those machines and the lever-headed jargon that management took for a manifestation of genius.

The problem was that we needed experience to get experience. We overcame this by signing up for temp agencies, which tacitly understood that a “self-starter” with a “can-do” attitude (i.e., one who can convincingly say yes regardless of the truth), who had finished college and could type at least 40 words a minute, could probably figure out how to survive an office job. After all, these agencies had everything to gain by a temp who could fake it and learn quickly, and nothing to lose by a temp who couldn’t. So, pretending to the experience we lacked, we got our experience, experience be damned.

When as a temp I made my entree into the offices of corporate Empirica, I didn’t think it would be all that different from a non-corporate workplace. By that time I’d had at least fifteen jobs in various small businesses, where people were people—that is, where they could be eccentric, hip, asinine or powerlessly malicious, so long as they didn’t raid the till. As I had no experience with white-collar culture when growing up—Mommy was a schoolteacher and Daddy a graphic artist—office life was utterly new to me, and from day one I struggled with its strangeness and irrationality, while others appeared to take it for granted.

One of the first indications that I was entering an alien culture was my agency’s advice to remove all traces of graduate studies from my resume. At first this didn’t make sense. Why would the ability to exercise esthetic and ethical judgment relative to a body of knowledge be an impediment? I was given to know that not only did post-baccalaureate learning make coworkers and supervisors insecure, but learning in the arts and humanities was an especially compromising asset, something that rendered one superfluously cultured and professionally obtuse. Wonder of wonders, a place that required an education also scorned learning as something that solely gratified one’s ego and made others look stupid. So I pretended to be a nice guy with nothing on his mind but his boring job—naturally I wanted to master the conditions that would secure my living and save me from having to pull espressos, frame posters, sell books, water plants or stack books for $7 an hour.

At first it puzzled me, this preposterous assumption that white-collar work was not for the cultivated. As most office work would be easy for a child of ten, the assumption was clearly not based on the fear that the work would be too difficult for an educated adult. Nor could it have been predicated on the possibility that the work might be too easy. After all, technology, engineering and business graduates were hailed as eminently eligible for this work, for which they were just as superfluously educated as a Literature graduate. No, this antipathy to the arts and letters boiled down to a cultural prejudice. This is not to say that there aren’t white-collar jobs that require years of experience, education and training; it’s to point out that office culture was not governed by practical concerns as much as by the prejudicial morality of the white-collar American Philistine. It is a culture driven by stereotypes of professionalism as manifest in attitude, interest, appearance, diction and deed.

Fortunately, having accessed this culture via temporary employment, I could attribute some of my adjustment difficulties to a lack of familiarity with the particular workplace. Still, I felt like an immigrant or a spy. I’m sure there were others who felt the same, as there appeared to be little difference between acting and being. For me, however, adapting to this culture essentially became the job; meanwhile, I acquired all my technical skills heuristically on company time. I came to understand that certain people actually preferred falsehood to truth—they’d take false optimism over true pessimism any day. Thus, in omitting what no one wanted to hear, I was able to rationalize away ethical qualms about being dishonest. In fact, office culture made the lie of omission not only preferable but necessary. And the office people really appreciated being kept in the dark; in that culture, the truth was an unnecessary inconvenience. Was it so odd, then, that where I pretended to a morality, attitude and competence I didn’t have, I received rave reviews?

My agency especially appreciated this dissimulation. I needed experience to get experience, and, one way or another, I had gotten my experience. They were most thankful to have in me a veritable “human resource”—that is, a walking, talking, breathing, commodity with a can-do attitude. I’d get agency calls—”Do you know PhotoShop?” I’d say yes, which meant that, yes, I could learn it before anybody knew that I didn’t know it. I’d go out on an assignment that required mastery of PhotoShop and, under the stress of having to perform, I’d learn it and add it to the growing list of applications on my resume. Over time, my learning and acting skills sharpened, as did my actual expertise. I lied to learn and learned to lie until the lie became the truth and I achieved my objective: I was making at least $13 an hour (the agency was charging $30) and eating meat again.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

These were the Empire’s greatest modern poets. These were the erudite, pedantic colossi who cast their long, dense shadows across the dawning 20th century’s literary landscape. They spawned dumpsters full of masters and doctoral theses, gave birth to academic departments. They are responsible for “poetics,” that ersatz-Aristotelian science of poetry. These literary immortals of America’s Golden Age of Modern Poetry are even regarded by some, mostly American academics, as the greatest poets that have ever lived.

I’m in no position to judge whether they warrant such eminence. It would take decades of assiduous study and ancillary research. And it’s as difficult now as ever to figure out what they were on about. Besides, as they would have wished, their posterity is not in the hands of the vulgar public, to whom it has always has been easier to read something intelligible, entertaining, and free of allusions and references that require a scholar to discover what they allude and refer to; it’s under the jurisprudence of the academy.

Out of this same academy issues the “new” poetry, a poetry entrenched in ivory-tower conventions established almost a century ago. Its distinguishing feature is the “difficulty” that has come to characterize modern poetry to the extent of self-parody—to the extent that, to be modern, a poem need only be vague, equivocal, allusive, auto-referential, figuratively dense and/or impenetrably objective, and intoned in a monody so clichéd it would render a lunch menu “poetic.” The post-postmodern poets of this Bronze Age of American Poetry—the protégés of the protégés of the protégés—express themselves as the mentors of the mentors of their mentors did, though with less originality. If Ashbery looks like something begot of Stevens and Breton, the new stuff looks like something begot of Ashbery and Glück. A quick read would suggest that it consists of mildly disturbing ideas couched in figurative terms and voiced in the breathy, nostalgic melancholia of the career student.

A typical new poem one finds in the New Yorker—one of the few popular magazines that still publish poetry—is the short lyric of about 10 to 20 lines, consisting of a series of figures within figures. Admittedly, I do not see how compounded significance translates into greater significance. After all, we usually only remember the simplest and most straightforward ideas, and usually have to further simplify them to remember them at all. We are inherently impressed by the difficult made simple, by the summary expression. And compounded figuration neither impresses nor entertains. That is why, after reading thousands of these little lyrical truffles, you can only recall the most seemingly incidental observations or fragmented ideas, and usually those which were unusually lucid and vivid. A master like Chaucer, on the other hand, leaves you with entire stories, scenes and dialogues, as if you had experienced the situation yourself. But that is what a master does, and not what figurative constipation does. Of course, their authors will say that they were never intended to be memorable or entertaining—only spectacular, musical, whimsical…what they call “moving”…what they call poetry…what I call another tricked-out Moleskine blurb.

The prototypes of the short modern lyric are Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and Williams’ “Pastoral.” But Pound’s famous one-figure, one-impression imagist poem spoke to a modern urban condition through the figurative lens of the ancient Orient, and Williams’ walk through a suburban slum transformed down-home abjection into a revelation of spiritual/esthetic maturity. They were significant experiments—precedents in form and substance. As for the latter-day technopoeic jags of compounded metaphor, allusion and euphemism, they keep time in MFA monody and that’s about it.

Over the last decade there have been a few well-circulated essays on the Fall of poetry. All have stressed the fact that poetry is, on the one hand, an established route to respectable academic tenure and, on the other, a vain hobby in the eyes of the reading public and publishing industry. They all state the obvious: on the one hand, people can now make a living as poets and publish their poetry and, on the other hand, no one reads their doggerel. A survey of the general reading public would likely render this frequent response: “Poetry? Got nothing against it. Just can’t understand it.”

The early moderns were differently situated. They were not immured in the academy: Eliot, bank clerk and Faber acquisitions editor; Pound, trust-fund hubby and patron hawk; Stevens, insurance executive; Williams, doctor; Moore, librarian… As there were no contemporary colossi to parrot, these pedant-hierophants of modern poetry took their ideas from over 3000 years of literature and song. Their successors’ successors, the post-postmoderns, however, have taken after the postmoderns, who have taken after the moderns. Three generations, same century, same country, same language—no wonder their shit is so easy to parody; it’s already a parody.

The first moderns were idiosyncratically distinct. They were also—whether conspicuously pedantic, impenetrably objective, musically fractious, or heavy-handed with the OED—compromised by art. And they produced reams of criticism in which they did not abstain from leveling that charge at their predecessors. Pound lambasted Milton for “ramping and lionizing.” Eh, has any literary figure ramped and lionized like Pound? Have you read the ABC of Ramping? Why are the Guide and the Companion indispensable? Eliot noted that Donne was “not too nice about coherence.” Was Eliot? They also tended to abridge, cut the passing and connective tissue out of a poem until it did not recognize prose or the vernacular. This mot-juste mania might have resulted in the ellipses of the “Wasteland,” the reportage of Patterson, and the fragmentation of The Cantos, but it certainly established the disconnectedness that is now a typical feature of poetry.

As the moderns obscured their meaning in technique—dues of the experimentalism that has virtually defined modernity—they became less, not more, like their models of old. Homer, Catullus, Ovid, Martial, Chaucer, Dante, Villon, LaFontaine, et al were comparatively lucid and comprehensible in their respective idioms. If referential or allusive, their references and allusions were popular currency. The moderns, however, became less, not more, accessible and relevant to a general readership, or, for that matter, any readership. They vaunted their difficulty, defended it as an expression of the complexity of modern existence. They offered historical justifications, such as the false factoid that great poetry was never composed for the polloi, but for elite, highly educated patrons. They set poetry apart from prose, which, though not free of the most egregious experimentalism, has always been the vehicle of the pulp and tabloid. Prose has remained the most accessible vehicle of literary expression because it has been primarily utilized as a form of communication. While experimentation nourished its range of expression, prose never abandoned its necessity to communicate to anyone who could read. Poetry, on the other hand, atrophied into poetry’s only genre—poetry for poetry’s sake—and poets became poetry’s only audience. This, however, appears to be just what the moderns wanted, or at least it’s the direction in which Stevens suggests that modern poetry should evolve:

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed…

—Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry”

Well, here we are. The stage has long been built, the actor is still up there speaking slowly and meditatively, and the audience is still invisible, repeating to itself exactly what it wants to hear. In other words, a century later, poetry is still droning on in a meditative tone once considered new, to an audience of one (its author). On this modality depend the academic arm of the creative writing industry and the poetry professionals, career students and itinerant lecturers who promote, publish and try to penetrate each other without really knowing or caring whether an actual reading public exists. Their autistic doggerel is exclusively bartered in the halls of the academy, where careers advance via the favor of eminent unquotables who judge the contests, chair the departments, teach their own poetry and select their successors.

There is an exception to these academy careerists—Bukowski, who is possibly the most commercially successful poet in modern history. Though he didn’t make it into Norton Anthology’s class of 1920, his readers stand by him as steadfastly as detective-fiction readers stand by their Marlowe and Spade. Admittedly, he was a genre writer, a pulp writer of, call it, heroic confessions. But his readership now spans three generations, going back half a century. Much to the chagrin of the academics, he has endured in his own and a half a dozen other languages. Despite this, the pedant-hierophants of the high modernism insist that poetry should not appropriate the Philistine traits that have met with scandal, popularity and success in, say, Martial, Villon, Byron or Pushkin. But the latter didn’t write for academic audiences, want what academics had, or live the way academics lived. They achieved their success (and immortality) in terms of a popular literature. To some this is inspiring. To others they seem to have existed solely to debunk the exclusivity and obscurantism on which, like the red wheelbarrow, so much depends.

When all is said and done, poetry is an art whose medium is language, which is a medium of communication. Where language fails to communicate, so does poetry. Poets can continue to justify their incomprehensibility on the grounds that poetry, whether it’s “spoken word” or “hendecahedric prosodics,” must be subjectively interpreted. However, if they fail to communicate with readers, they fail the function of language and produce mellifluous nonsense that poses as intelligent, which is worse than being frankly shallow.

I know that theories of the function of language are incessantly bandied over the faux-wood finish of the seminar table. I know that there are Byzantine opera magna one should devour before arrogating to a credible opinion on the matter. I know that careers are made of reference sections bolstering or defeating such opinions. But why should I care? I am the reading public. I work a shitty job, after which I am physically exhausted and mentally bogged. If I bother to read poetry at all, I read it because it moves me with its cadence, humors me with its wit and engages me with its wisdom and sentience—that is, because it entertains and enlightens me. At best, I come away from poetry knowing and feeling something afresh about life. That’s why, rather than waste an hour decoding some MFA’s four lines of monodic equivocation, I’d prefer to chuckle through the Canterbury Tales, Martial’s epigrams, Byron’s or Pushkin’s epics, or Bukowski’s confessional pulp.

It’s convenient to blame society (hegemony of audiovisual media, invasion of the Goths, etc.) on the loss of contemporary poetry’s audience. But, blame as you like, there’s not much post-postmodern poetry out there that folks have the patience to crack. The profit-driven contests, prize trading, degree bartering, university-press networking and CV embellishing may have advanced poetics, but they’ve rodgered poetry. In any event, if readers a millennium from now spend their evenings between the pages of a book, they’ll likely go for the stuff that’s intelligible and entertaining, no matter how vulgar our contemporary guardians of the high modern deemed it.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

One emotion often demonstrated by those who are stunted by morality and religion is indignation. Becoming indignant advertises and flatters its possessor as being of higher moral integrity. It ostensibly shows that he or she has conviction enough to defend a valued paradigm of the way one ought to think and feel about the matter in question. This presumption, however, bypasses the elemental concept, and worse, the reality, that people may think and feel whatever they damned well please.

Indignation has the effect of leaving its audience stunned and confused. After severe demonstrations, they will sometimes apologize for or clarify what they perceive to have been the cause; however, these apologies and clarifications often come off as a wimpy attempt to placate the indignant one. Here are some common starter phrases uttered by victims of indignation: “Not that I…,” “What I meant is…,” “I was only…” Or, in less formal circumstances, the victim may even blurt something comic in the vernacular vein, like, “Don’t get your panties in a twist,” “Let’s have a fat fuckin’ hairy why don’t we,” “That a crab claw hanging out of your ass?” or “Does your wife know you’re gay?” These latter reactions, though more appropriate, usually only serve to buttress the indignant one’s exaggerated self-regard.

But let me differentiate between indignation and taking offense. Indignation is anger at something taken to be immoral or mean, whether personally directed or not. Taking offense is a conviction that there has been an actual transgression against one’s person. For instance, Don Corleone took offense, but never became indignant. That is, he never put on a show of moral righteousness. There were two reasons for this: one, it was unwise to alert those on whom he planned to take revenge and, two, it would have been undignified. Don Corleone was a bit more of a pagan: he preferred opportune retribution, or payback. Furthermore, he knew that, ironically, the indignant lose their dignity, which only serves to alienate or amuse the offending party and bolster the case that the indignant one, being demonstrably asinine, deserved the offense.

The Bible is full of examples of indignation and even holds it in high regard, which is unfortunate, seeing as this has encouraged this importune attitude in many a true believer. In the Bible, indignation is deified. The god of the Jews is repeatedly called upon to show the “full wrath of his indignation” for the iniquities suffered by his worshippers. And this temperamental disposition is invariably a precursor to violent vengeance. In Revelations 14.10, indignation is described as the cup into which Yahweh pours his wrath. And, friends, it’s a bum chug for those who refuse to bend over. When old Yahweh’s indignant with you it means two of two things: one, you’re wrong and, two, you’re toast. Is it then so strange that a culture informed by such a divinity would confuse being indignant with being right?

Empirican politicians invoke the Bible precisely for this reason: it’s scary. Think Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, with “love” and “hate” tattooed across his knuckles. And like their god, these grim, punitive politicos raise their hackles when called into question. Indignation has become rhetorically programmatic with a few of them, who in a less cowed democracy would be tried as political criminals. But, by being indignant, they cleverly shift the show from the theatre of politics to that of morality, as if their integrity were called into question. Most Empiricans, as the rest of the world well knows, are too dummied down to discern between politics and morality anyway. Instead of a Realpolitik they have a Hollypolitik. Instead of holding these inflated nerds to account for their actions, they let themselves be entertained by the spectacle of appeals to morality.

But it isn’t strange that people get indignant when reminded of their weaknesses and faults. It’s a defense tactic. Even if they haven’t been publicly exposed, humiliated or embarrassed, the possibility constitutes a threat. Take the irate tonality and couched threats, for example, of our mighty Emperor. As the world knows, he and his coterie reek of the double-guff of the judge and executioner. Thus, when they get indignant, it is scary. Heads roll.

Indignation, which is based on the Latin word dignitas, meaning worth, is anger aroused by the sense that something has been denied or stripped of its worth. As it is the view of the indignant that their sense of worth must be everybody else’s, they often plod into hypocrisy as readily as they trample on others’ values to enforce their own. Politicians who ban what they practice, condemn what they perpetrate, and deny what they allow are, again, a perfect example. Killing for peace, whoring for fidelity, coveting for equity and lying for veracity depend on the end justifying the means. Never mind that the end is antithetical to the means. And too bad questioning that contradiction amounts to questioning the hypocrite’s belief in the justness of his or her intention. Worst of all, we have put them in charge of the Empire, when, as Wyndham Lewis said, “Continuity, in the individual as in the race, is the diagnostic of a civilized condition.”

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

Recently, on a Sunday afternoon, I took a bike ride and in a little public park saw four or five Latin-Empirican families having lunch together. The food was laid out on picnic tables, kids were playing, grandparents and parents were sitting around talking, bouncing babies and eating, dads and granddads, uncles and nephews, were standing around talking politics, shop, marriage, plumbing, cars, soccer…whatever. I tried to imagine four WASP families having a picnic like that in a public park, commingling the extended relatives of three generations—I tried, but I couldn’t.

As the surrounding neighborhood was overpriced, there were, indeed, WASPs around. But they were jogging with iPods, walking dogs, pushing strollers, polishing cars, raking lawns, loading golf clubs into the backs of SUVs—there was even a guy on a little patch of grass at the side of his magnificent brownstone, sitting in what looked like a yoga position. In short, the WASPs were absorbed in solitary activities.

It then occurred to me that the basis of this difference—the solitary versus communal way of life—is mostly financial. I mean, most Latin-Empirican immigrants work service jobs—cleaning, maintenance, construction, retail, delivery, food, transportation, etc. Most earn less than $10 an hour. Most WASPs, on the other hand, work white-collar jobs and have incomes two to fifty times greater than those of their service-sector counterparts. As the incomes of the office worker and non-office worker stratify, so do their respective cultures. There are now two economies and two cultures in modern Empirica—the office economy and the service economy, the office culture and the service culture. While office culture reflects the isolated environment of the cubicle, service culture reflects the crowded, noisy environment of the restaurant or marketplace.

For instance, the engagement in activities of self-improvement, such as exercising, rakng leaves or just walking the dog, is not social. And whether they’re building their muscles to destroy would-be evildoers, tightening their abs and gluteals so they can attract a mate, strengthening their hearts and lungs so they can, like Rod Stewart, remain “forever young,” WASP professionals tend to work on themselves in their spare time, work being the operative word.

WASPS also value self-reliance, as marketers and politicians well know. Take the average WASP in pleated Dockers (WIPD), for instance. He may pretend to put family above all. But aside from water-cooler chit-chat about padding the Crate & Barrel coffee table so that baby Kyler won’t gouge out an eyeball, he really cares more about work than family. He knows that his job makes everything else possible. Sure, he may think of himself as moral, ethical and community minded, but such self-regard is only substantiated by his payment for things like private schools, nannies and piano lessons. And with the miraculous power of the Internet, he can handle most of this from his cubicle while he’s supposed to be working. He doesn’t even have to show up for his morality, which is, admittedly, convenient.

But the self-reliance of the WIPD is actually an almost total reliance on his employer (i.e., the company, firm or corporation that supports his lifestyle). If the WIPD were employed in the service sector, he would soon have to rely on the people, facilities and institutions outside his place of employment for basic needs, like medical care and schooling for his kids. In other words, his self-reliance is actually a total reliance on his level of income.

As white-collar professionals rely less on family and community for their way of life, so do they put less value on things public—parks, schools, transportation, health clinics, etc. They don’t need these public facilities so why should they pay taxes for them? Concomitantly, they develop a hygienic abhorrence of things public—things that have the ear-waxy reek and gummy residue of old currency. They fortify themselves against the world of the have-nots. They buy trucks in case they have to escape over the rubble of civilization, attack dogs in case the have-nots get in a go-for-the-gold frame of mind. Their offspring become projects in which they invest social and financial advantage. And they load up on gear.

Meanwhile, not everybody can work in the offices of a company, firm or corporation. Somebody has to drive and repair motor vehicles, build and clean buildings, grow, harvest, prepare and serve food, manufacture, ship and sell goods, etc. Because service jobs don’t pay enough to support the delusion self-reliance, the folks who work them are forced to rely on community facilities to a greater extent. They are also forced to rely on each other for subsistence and companionship. Let me put is this way: there are people in our society who can’t afford to be self-reliant, and there is no good reason to expect them to be. So, as they provide for what we need, why shouldn’t we provide for what they need?

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

I think, Now that’s an equivocal, vapid thing to say.

Then I think again. While expressions like “c’est la vie” or “shit happens” write everything off to arbitrary occurrence and futility, the gotta-do saying has an obligatory smack. It’s tough. It carries a sense of duty. Duty to whom? Why, to oneself, of course: you gotta do what you gotta do. It’s a write-off to self-interest. Hence the tone of empathy in my boss’s voice.

So the gottadoer moves on and another individual takes his place—a four-hundred-pounder who has dandruff in her eyebrows and smells like a yak in heat. The boss says, “This one’s gonna stay—I mean, who the hell else’ll take her?” The presumption is that any gotta-do ambitions on the part of this fast-food pus bomb will fail by her sheer repulsiveness.

However, she soon confides in me: “I’m lookin’ out for number one,” she says.

True to her word, within three months she masters the given responsibilities and assumes new ones. Then she negotiates a fifteen-percent raise. She says to me, “Jan, you’re honest. Me? I’m gettin’ mine now, ’cause they gonna screw me anyhow.” I’m not sure who “they” are, but I follow her logic.

She starts taking days off, logging 3-hour chat sessions, leaving early, snarfing things out of oil-stained bags that smell like deep-fried foot fungus. I know something has to give, but I don’t know what. Then the fatal day arrives. My boss tells me in the utmost confidence, of course, that he fired her for ordering thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise on the company credit card and having it delivered to her home. He displays his deep hurt—it amounts to a betrayal of trust, he says. His eyes get watery. But all I can say is, “Gotta do what you gotta do.”

Now I no longer have a job. Now I wish I’d never heard the expression. The gottadoers are everywhere—like those zombies in Night of the Living Dead, feeding on the flesh of the living to stay animated. Politicians dismantling public institutions to deliver profits to corporate lobbies, butchers selling chuck tenders as filet mignons at $23 a pound, writers holding contests with $1,000 prizes and $20 entry fees, Tycocrats, WorldCommandants, Enronators… Empirica is full of these gottadoers, number-oners, careerist bugaboos with show dogs, SUVs and strap-on superiorities. It’s as if a life of selfish predation and opportunism were no longer a choice, but a condition.

The gotta-do imperative manifests at every class stratum. At the lowest end of the gottadoer food chain are the criminal gottadoers, largely identified by the fact they’ve fallen into the jaws of the behemoth. The number of this species have quadrupled in the last two decades, or since incarceration has become a national-defense concern (social stability) and an economic lever (reduced unemployment rolls). Our rapacious Empire now incarcerates roughly 500 out of every 100,000 of its population. Only a month ago it was the last industrialized nation to execute minors. It is now one of the last to execute people at all. But its astringent ideology of tough love and self-reliance hasn’t dissuaded the criminal gottadoer in the least. On the contrary, this abject and futureless spawn defies such Puritanical laws in good conscience. Where laws are repressive and hypocritical, toughness and self-reliance are lawless. While wealthy, educated gottadoers purchase the protection and benefit of Enlightenment humanist law, poor, uneducated gottadoers fall under the sword of brutal Hebraic law. With every lobbied legislation come a multitude of defiant infractors.

Recently I sat on a grand jury and reviewed over thirty criminal cases a day for two days. Most of these crimes—everything from shoplifting to murder—were committed out of passion, insanity, greed, stupidity and addiction. The criminal gottadoer as one who rationally pursues an appetite (e.g., Hannibal Lector) is mostly Hollywood pap. The vast majority of these gottadoers were poor and uneducated. Most were arrested for acts that were only personally harmful—dope smoking, vagrancy, pill popping, prostitution, etc. They tended to suffer from a lack of savoir faire and a cultural mode that branded them as unsuitable for work—a surmountable condition not to be confused with congenital stupidity. Empirica’s immediate solution? Let them work it out in the trees, then incarcerate. And for the long term? Make sure that prison construction remains in inverse proportion to school construction, with prison construction on the increase. Make sure that Empirica remains the most incarcerating and least educating industrialized nation on earth.

Whenever I return from a stay abroad, I am struck by the prevalence of criminal culture at the middle-class stratum of our ghetto Empire. This cultural of criminality has generated a species of gottadoer who, while not necessarily poor, imitates the manner of the criminal: he’s the toughie gottadoer. Posing a physical threat, this duncical model of self-reliance secures his safety by inspiring fear. It’s hard not to be awed by his cocksure strutting, strong-silent flexing, canine growling and muscular inflammation. Take our own Emperor for instance. Note the simian lapse into pugnaciousness when, bereft of reason, he senses that he’s failing to persuade. Note the threatening posture and view of the world as a threatening place. Note the constant evocation of doom, followed by the toughie posturing and rhetoric that make career housewives feel safe and secure. See him swinging his scrotum round the campfire and peering vigilantly into the darkness. His every initiative is accompanied by a threat. During his most recent propaganda campaign to reform Social Security (and, it goes without saying, reward the rich and punish the poor), he pro-nounced to his fella Empiricans that the Arch Evildoer had just called him on his evildoer hot-line (1-800-INFIDEL):

“Just this morning the Arch Evildoer told me that he plans a major attack against freedom. Why? Because he doesn’t like freedom. No. Nuh-uh. [Five-second pause, vigilant gaze into the void.] But the lovers of freedom around the world know that freedom has a voice in Empirica and that the enemies of freedom want to kill the lovers of freedom. Why? Because freedom haters hate the Empirican way of life. And the lovers of freedom won’t stand for it. No. Nuh-uh. [Five-second pause, vigilant gaze into the void.] Because freedom lovers are free. Because they know that where freedom is free, liberty is free. They know that freedom will freely conquer those who wish that freedom wasn’t free. That is why I ask you to be alert, be watchful and be fearful at every moment. For freedom, in order to be free, must be freely pro-tected. Yeh. Uh-huh. [Five-second pause, vigilant gaze into the void.] That’s why I was elected Emperor. Yeh. To pro-tect your freedom from the enemies of freedom and to…uh…uh…freely exercise the freedom to…uh…uh…do that.”

So you see, even our mighty Emperor is a toughie gottadoer—tough against the enemies of freedom, tough against the haters of the “Empirican way of life.” The ultimate goal of all this toughness is anybody’s guess. But who cares? The posture is there—the tough, regular guy out to kick some ass. True, he has waged the most useless and costly war in Empirican history. True, his war and tax cuts have strapped Empirica with the biggest debt in history. True, he has inspired enough irrational fear in his citizens to unite them against an abstraction. True, his way of spreading freedom, bizarre Old Testament sermonizing, irrational moral clout, extreme rendition and island torture camps look more like the Inquisition than anything democratic.

But, like our tough, regular Emperor, tough, regular Empiricans couldn’t give a damn what the word freedom might really mean. They’d rather let the intellectuals and artists in the halls of the Academy sort that out. The real world belongs to tough, regular gottadoers of the middle classes, the white-collar boys who “keep it real” by saying things like “Yo, bee-ach! Whassup, yo? Goin’ to the staff meeting, yo?” They all have their tattoos. A Mara Salvatrucha Trece (MS-13 gang member) wears his like a badge of honor, so why not Eddie Bauer and Suzy Chapstick? They’re not completely unfamiliar with the dark side, the counterculture, those hepster criminals who do all sorts of wacky things like loiter in parking lots and urinate against walls.

Rock-n-roll, free love and Harley Davidsons are rather quaint these days. In a two-minute Sin City session you can bang a whore, steal a car, score drugs and splatter scores of oblivious pedestrians. The best TV show in decades, The Sopranos, is essentially an episodic tale of the criminal Everyman. Today, antiestablishment culture, the most advanced culture, is criminal culture (as it was in the era of noir films and literature). And criminals, broadly defined, are those who serve selfish ends to the detriment of others—who gotta do what they gotta do. Jeffrey Domer, for instance, had to lobotomize people to turn them into sex slaves—acts of extreme, masturbatory self-indulgence.

It is a poor center of man’s actions, himself.

—Francis Bacon, “On Wisdom for a Man’s Self”

Most criminals, no matter how irrational, have rationales. Now that Empirica has invaded a foreign country to secure its oil reserves under the pretext of spreading “freedom and democracy,” killed hundreds of thousands of foreigners under the pretext of preserving its “way of life,” deprived its citizens of health care under the pretext of protecting them from “big government,” chiseled another generation out of a decent education under the pretext of enforcing “standards,” delivered from taxation and regulation the corporate magnates who bankrolled its popularity contests, and imprisoned one out of every two hundred of its citizens, two questions remain: Did it really have to? And will history think so?

Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

I’m going to get me a car
And I’ll be heading on down the road
Then I won’t have to worry
About that broken-down, ragged Ford

—Chuck Berry, “No Money Down”

The automobile is the Empire’s most popular machine. As the name of this machine indicates, it is a means of self-mobility, which is the Empire’s most popular activity. To be moving, to get away from and go after—this is what Americans do. And they like to do it on their own. They like to have their hands on the wheels of their own mobility machines. Chuck Berry’s songs are full of the idea that, with a fast car, your problems are solved. Moving, rambling and rolling are ingrained in American pop culture. To get over it, get on with it, get passed it, let it go, go for it, get ahead, “go, go, go”—the American idiom abounds with mobility metaphors. It boils down to a popular notion that you can leave your sorrows behind and follow your dreams. Who cares if, inevitably, you will arrive and have to be somewhere? Who cares if your problems will abide and your dreams will materialize into another tedious reality? The temporary amnesia of movement is what counts—the escape-pursuit paradigm that mobility is the solution.

I grew up in the California suburbs. Bicycles, roller-skates, skateboards, minibikes, motorcycles and cars were the primary media of my peers’ ambitions. I started driving at the age of fourteen. Driving to impress was programmatic. Good, fast driving was an expression of competence, independence, uniqueness. Driving swiftly through dense fog on windy coastal-range roads was recreation. I graduated from college and began living in big cities, where owning a car was more problematic than necessary. Still, by that time, I’d already owned several cars and was destined to own several more. By the time I owned my last car, a Chevy van, I was indifferent to driving: I could live with or without it. Then I did something that changed my opinions about driving: I drove that shitty Chevy across our vast, abject Empire to make a move from one city to another. Three-and-a-half-thousand miles’ worth of movement, ten days’ operating a motor vehicle, mechanical problems every other day and thirty-plus near-lethal misses later, I arrived, miraculously, alive.

Ever since, I have found driving to be repugnant, even in a good car. I am amazed that people aren’t dying all over the place, that they manage as safely as they do, that auto accidents are only the fifth-largest cause of death in the Empire. Now I don’t own a car and hope I’ll never have to. When I have to drive, here’s how I do it: I rent, I insure, I buckle-up, I signal, I check mirrors, and take every precaution and advantage inside and outside of the car. Most of all, I abide by the laws. I don’t drive, I survive.

But danger isn’t the only thing I hate about driving. There’s the meaningless labor of the thing. There’s simply no enjoyment in operating a motor vehicle. It’s boring. You can’t enjoy the view or carry on anything but a side-of-the-head conversation. And it’s just about the most expensive and environmentally destructive way to put yourself and others in peril.

Automobile culture itself is obnoxious and senseless. Cars are the gaudiest fashion items in existence. Designwise, they’ve abandoned balance and the clean line. Nowadays, cars have ungainly rears and narrow, beaky noses—like plastic avocados on wheels. Not only are they predominantly ugly, but the uglier they are, the more their drivers take pride in them. Power is the priority. Of all the fashion items on the market, cars are the most demonstrative of power because they must perform. A literature professor once told me that a powerful performer always gives the sense that there is power in reserve. Because power in reserve is potential—not what is but what could be—the cult of power manifests itself in items that embody superfluous potential. This is most obvious in the SUV. This beastly vehicle, swilling gas, destroying roads and lives, this ungainly, polluting and treacherous juggernaut, is driven precisely by those who must display their potential—luxury-car consumers.

It was a bad day when power became fashionable and took precedence over design, function, maneuverability, safety, economy and old-fashioned common sense. It was bad for the whole world because the cult of power insinuated itself into the Empire’s foreign policy. It became the imperial style. There are, of course, all kinds of power. But the kind I’m talking about is physical: torque, mass, inertia, endurance—muscle-bound humans and muscle-bound machines. When such power is at the modern barbarian’s command, guess what happens? Does it stay in reserve? Of course not. The natural law of power is that its exercise is the proof of its existence. The barbarian wants to prove what he’s got. So he goes sailing down the freeway at 90 mph, encapsulated in crashing guitar and drum noises, changing lanes with demonstrated superiority to turn signals and laws, blind to everything below the side windows of his ponderous snatch magnet, proving to himself and the victims of his egotism that he can perform. The use of “American might” by our prodigal barbarian Emperor is just another example of the power cult, the squandering of potential to show the world what he’s got.

I went out one day to buy a truck
I saw one that looked so huge and big
When I got that sucker on the road
I was looking down at everything
And I really liked that
Everyone obeyed me
I thought, This is power
Like a religious hour

—Iggy Pop, “Knucklehead”

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

“Passing on the left,” he quacks as he goes by on the sidewalk, where it is illegal to ride. Then, nearly missing me, he cranks his head around and yells, “I SAID, PASSING ON THE LEFT!”

He’s beyond reach. No need to get flustered over a dude posing as Lance Armstrong. But another passes, and another, and it dawns on me that not one of these cyclists is wearing civilian dress—that the jerk in tights (JIT) is not the exception, but the rule.

From an historical perspective, a street full of JITs is an insignificant detail in the big picture—a conservative era in America, characterized by consumer culture, class stratification, corporate crime, high unemployment, evangelical Christianity, isolationism, terrorism, militarism, supply-side economics, and an Emperor who was high-chaired to power by his father, elected to office by a conservative Supreme Court and maintained in power by voter suppression and voting fraud. The historical perspective is summary, comprehensive, assimilative of cause and effect. The JIT, however, is a cultural manifestation, an experience that, in all its specificity, seems historically irrelevant. But is it?

When I was a kid in the 70s, the bicycle was an indispensable mode of transportation. Spaces were vast and forms of public transportation practically nonexistent. Yet in my everyday use of the bicycle, I can’t recall seeing a cyclist wearing a helmet. Even a friend of my parents, who was, in fact, a professional cyclist, often biked to our house wearing neither helmet nor sponsor-plastered team jersey. She might have worn them at her training camp in the Sierra Nevadas or while actually competing at lower altitudes, but how would the general public have known? Something has changed, because it is now commonplace to wear pro-cycling gear and tout the Snapple logo when your only relation the Snapple Corporation was your use of its product to lubricate Tuesday’s goat-cheese-and-avocado sandwich.

When the idiosyncratic becomes commonplace, it does so because it is acceptable. In the case of the JIT, one finds none of the sexual rejection, under-the-breath ridicule, and would-that-I-could-kick-your-ass-with-impunity glares that usually attend adult indulgences of comic-book fantasies in public. Do you see guys driving around in Batmobiles? Why not? Because that kick ain’t worth the one their asses would get. Meanwhile, thousands are imitating Lance Armstrong—gay men in strings of four or five, pumping arse-to-nostril with autonomic precision, straight people in matching in outfits, shouting directions as if recreation were the execution of a life-altering agenda: “Cut right at the overpass, fifty yards, left at the bridge!” No, there is simply no social deterrent against the JIT.

Fitness, which has hitherto justified a plethora of public displays of exhaustion (PDEs), does not adequately account for the preponderance of the JIT on America’s roads and bike paths. PDE buffs aren’t picky about whether they sweat through Lycra or Spandex, a rash of florescence or plain gray, so long as they sweat and the public knows it. But the JIT, though he or she may sweat profusely at times, seems to be more intensely focused on looking like a bass pro’s open tackle box. Furthermore, if the purported objective of the PDE is longevity, the JIT’s motives must lie elsewhere. I mean, who in their right mind would misconstrue obstructing traffic and clipping complete strangers on America’s most dangerous roads and sidewalks as the path to longevity? One must, therefore, leave the PDE, that purgatory of pain and redundancy, to those who practice it on stationary torture-rack-like contraptions in front of floor-to-ceiling windows.

Thorstein Veblen’s explanation of the prevalence of the JIT would probably suggest a motive of pecuniary display. Indeed, a Capitol Hill attorney in $7,000 worth of pro-cycling trumpery would make an excellent icon of superfluous expenditure. For only after spawning to a certain level of the financial fish ladder could anyone expect to exhibit such freedom of waste. Have you ever seen a poor immigrant, his genitals stuffed into iridescent-green stretch shorts, trolling his package up and down the aisles of Whole Foods? That’s a privilege for those who can afford it. But The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen’s definitive treatise on pecuniary display, only offers an essential motive behind the prevalence of the JIT. A more contemporary, qualitative analysis is needed to address the particular form of this pecuniary pretense—that is, flagrant posturing as a sports celebrity.

A guy in his mid-30s enacting a tour-de-France victory in public is very much like a guy taking his inflatable Pamela Anderson love doll to dinner. It’s something you don’t want the kids to see—not because it’s evil, but because it leaves you at a loss for an explanation. The media is not entirely exempt from blame for this bizarre public role-playing. In the May 12, 2003 issue of the New Yorker I came across an ad for the Subaru Outback. The page was divided in two—the top half featuring a photo of Lance Armstrong, teeth clenched, muscles flexed, pedaling right at you in a mania to conquer, and the bottom half featuring the SUV hybrid. Poised in the center of the page was a quote, which I assume came out of the pro’s mouth: “If you’re tough enough, every road seems flat.” It’s the old personal-relativity angle that most advertisers use to tenderize the guilty-but-self-indulgent nouveaux riche—the reality-is-all-inside-you scam. Like Bush’s juxtaposition of tax cuts and jobs, the old arbitrary association was there—in this case, between vehicular toughness, Lance’s toughness, and your toughness. Unfortunately, association of proximity is not association of causation: Bush is not rewarding the rich to hire people and the Outback is a car, not a bike.

Still, the JITs are biting. And their obtuse and puerile enactments of hero worship via the acquisitive means of the adult are doing wonders for the economy. I fear that if these superfluous spenders were to suddenly grow up and become sensible, America’s business model would collapse. So maybe I ought to be grateful to the advertising, sports and media industries for fostering this delusional impulse buying, credit-card debt and acquisitiveness—even thank Lance Armstrong for a far more effective extrapolation into jobs than any tax cut for the rich has been.

Yet there are some major drawbacks to widespread poseurism. Though entertaining when taken to extremes by an individual (e.g., Catch Me If You Can), phoniness cuts the connection between form and function, letting form drift into the zone of the arbitrary and tacky. For those of you who doubt this effect, I entreat you to go to your local bike shop and try to buy a plain, white helmet. You’ll find an array of aerodynamic dunce caps, of foiled, finned, beaked, ribbed and corrugated sauceboats in glittering purple and chartreuse—the sort of esthetic that appeals to the appetite of the largemouth bass. That the adult homo erectus must buy these things and wear them in public is like a preëmptive strike on esthetic maturity.

We know that children go after the sweet and bright because they haven’t undergone the mellowing effects of age. But in kids we expect increasingly complicated and mixed thoughts and sentiments to mitigate their susceptibility to balls-out corneal assault. Just as their appetite for savory food will supercede the narrow universe of the sweet, so their taste for the lyrical complexity of, say, Scarlatti, should supercede their taste for the next bad-ass motherfucker and his drum machine. We expect that they will grow to prefer the bold yet muted tones of Titian to the Nike logo pulsing on an iridescent blue buttock. Or is that a wish-case scenario? Anyhow, when little boys carry around plastic phaser guns and give each other the Vulcan salute, we accept it because we’re convinced that it will not persist into their twenties, or worse, their forties. And when it does persist, we take it out with one of those happy drugs they prescribe nowadays for an ever increasing array of psychosocial abnormalities. What, then, is the JIT’s excuse? Is it that, in all other respects, the JIT is considered a developmentally normal adult? Or is it that the JIT, when threatened, gets litigious?

These mock-heroes manifest a certain unfulfilled desire for potency that adult complexities have not yet mitigated. They also reflect an empire’s rut for omnipotence, as manifest in the individual heroic poseur—like Caligula doing his gladiator bit. It goes without saying that a society of these insecure potency poseurs living out their grade-school fantasies on America’s roads does not provide for increased safety. And though they may be keeping the economy afloat, they have turned our public spaces into battlegrounds of Dacron, Lycra, Teflon, Kevlar, Spandex, and the logos of the corporations who sponsor the world’s most powerful politicians. In this latter respect, which is the most frightening one, the rise of the JIT is not at all historically irrelevant.

- Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

Nevertheless, there are those who visibly assume the role. And it’s embarrassing to watch them as they go public with their naked need for attention. Like impoverished street musicians, they’re mocked and ignored. Folks pass by, wisecracking in hushed tones or feigning distraction to bypass the unpleasantness of being embarrassed for them. Fortunately, most poets, philosophers and activists do not go public. They gratify their vanities in supportive, obscure subcultures, or in universities where they ply their passions on the young, gullible and whimsical. Some survive outside of these safe havens, but only by hiding from coworkers and acquaintances the obscene futility in which they daily engage, closeting their perverse leanings toward intellectual inquiry, esthetic perfection and social betterment. They hide the outrage evoked by a political climate that abets and exploits mass stupidity, shuffling obsequiously from office to market, suppressing an urge to take dramatic action against this pervasive chicanery like a flasher suppressing an urge to show his penis to the checker.

You may say, “Come on, writing beautiful verse, communicating original thoughts on human existence and fighting for a just and peaceful society are enormously respectable endeavors.” Congratulations on another dubious platitude. These endeavors are now about as respectable as they are relevant. It takes a culture to make cultural endeavors respectable and relevant. For example, we would have no Sophocles if 20,000 Greeks hadn’t spent two weeks a year drinking wine and going to the amphitheater. Sure, they had their Olympic games; but they also had their annual drama festival, which was an extended competition no less seriously attended than the Olympics. Activism too had its cultural context. In the Athenian democracy, citizens gathered to cast their votes in person. To exercise that right, they first had to hear the speakers, and these speakers–Demosthenes comes to mind immediately–were not politicians; they were activists who were of the people and whose end was to move the political will of the people.

Dr. Kinsey said of sex in America, “Everybody’s sin is nobody’s sin.” I say of America, nobody’s culture isn’t a culture. A few hundred thousand people with signs and banners gather in the National Mall to protest an unnecessary war. Yet this has no effect; war is waged, with fifty percent of the Nation supporting it and politicians willfully ignoring the other fifty percent. Those protesters do not represent a culture; they are an isolated, arbitrary phenomenon as quickly forgotten as a summer rain. The press and the politicians, once war is waged, continue as if there were no warnings whatsoever of the war’s uselessness. Even if the war turns out to be a universally acknowledged failure, that demonstration might well have not occurred, however well-founded its admonitions.

Poetry, philosophy and activism will always exist. But have they ever been as irrelevant and arbitrary as they are now? What these endeavors lack is not excellence; they lack a fourth of all Americans giving a damn. But there is an obvious impediment to giving a damn about anything that takes time: survival. Where there is time to cultivate there is cultivation; where there is cultivation there is enlightenment; where there is enlightenment there is progressive thought; and where there is progressive thought there is progressive political will. But this concatenation is simply impossible in a society as stratified as ours, where 5% of the populace benefits from the blind struggle of 95%. This dilemma does not amount to something as simple as a conspiracy; it amounts to something simpler: a fact.

A culture that concerns itself with poetry, philosophy and activism is not good for those whose sole ambition is to accumulate tremendous wealth. This fact has been cast in cultural terms: conservative culture versus liberal culture. Americans have taken sides in what is referred to as a “culture war.” But is it really a culture war? Is conservative culture a culture at all? Or is it big business for big profit? That the advocates of concentrated capital call themselves conservatives and claim to have a set of “values” is cultural camouflage. In Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the definition of culture is universally associated with intellectual and esthetic enlightenment by way of education and learning. There is no mention of business or profit in the definition. So the question is, why are big-business interests calling their agenda a cultural one? The answer is obvious: to disguise the fact that they have no cultural agenda and stand to benefit the least from one.

- Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2004, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.