Outskirts Press, INC.

50 Years of Self-deception?

Delusions Before Nightfall: Artz Carbuncle's Thoughts on Politics and Culture is a selection from the writing of a fictive poet, Artz Carbuncle, the stage name of the rebellious son of Thomas Stern Elliotte, a Cleveland banker. The pieces vary in tone from whimsy to satire to solemn expressions of horror at human folly, but all are responses to the gradual transformations of American culture since the 1960's. The picture of the country that emerges is of a nation fractured by an accumulating history of false judgments and cultivated divisions of opinion.
            The earliest writings are shadowed by the violence of the Vietnam War, the collapse of any social consensus about national policies for defining our values and place in world affairs, and the growing tensions between young and old expressed in the growth of pop culture. The next set of writings reflect the post-Vietnam culture of increasing "identity politics" — the rising centrality of issues of race, gender, sexual identity, and economic inequality. The final section of the book compiles essays, poems, and stories completed during the growing environmental crisis. A central theme in these pieces is the role played by commercial values and financial systems on the nation's capacity for constructive response to the challenges we face.
           The overall cast of the book is dark, but many of the selections suggest there is hope — if we can face the delusions that hold us in thrall.  The pieces are arranged under four headings: A Nation That Incorporates Oppression examines the effects of decisions by which the American political system has increasingly handed over power to corporate business interests. A Culture That Engenders Conflicts of Identity explores the effects on individual lives of our increasing awareness of issues of gender and gender identity. A Culture That Cultivates Intergenerational Division reflects the tensions between generations that have been so prominent since the 1960's. The last section of the book, A Nation That Rejects Nature Turns Biopathic, muses on our failure to respond meaninfully to the environmental crisis.

From MISERICORD:  Eve Jones onThe Health of Nations
 
 
            I was down to the Cocorico laundrysmat a couple of days ago tendin' to the sorts of personal business that usual draws an older gentleman like myself to such an establishment. The Wash'emdry Laundry is one of the social centers of the area, the equivalent of the barber shop before hippies and Hollywood hair stylists made long hair and beards acceptable to enough folks to reduce the clientele — and 'styling salons' as necessary as tanning beds to so many of the rest. In Cocorico, though, we do have a barber shop that guys check in with on a regular basis, and we do have a Post Office still, where the public gathers on important holy days like the payday Friday each month. And we have the Wash'emdry — a moniker no one know for sure how to pronounce, or how the owner came up with it in the first place.
            But, like the Post Office, the laundry is an equal opportunity employer and social interaction facilitator. If you get bored by male-dominated celebrations of coyote hunts, catfish jiggin', and sneakin' around the backwall mag rack at the drugstore, once Abe (our barber) has emancipated you by flippin' that striped apron from the chair, and has taken your standard charge and tip, the Wash'emdry beckons from across the street with anything from the complete obsessive silence of those hummin', rattlin' washers and driers, to some civilized exchanges with sometimes thoughtful and insightful women — and occasional men — who are happy to exchange views on most any topic the lot of you agree to pursue. Caroline being a representative sample of the opinionated and articulate women of Cocorico.
            And the other day, after I'd reluctantly accepted a haircut  executed to the tune of a barbarous harangue on the need — the "crying need for Christ's sake!" — for a Federal restoration of cyanide jolts in the carcasses of roadkill in order to protect local livestock and housepets from marauding predators, I crossed the street to where I'd parked in front of the laundry, got seven sacks of dirty clothes, sheets, and personals out the back of the truck, and ducked in through the open double doors. There were plenty of washers available and I had gotten things moving along pretty good before another customer came in. I greeted her warmly as someone I greatly enjoyed talking with on these laundry outings, and after she'd burdened two front loaders with her things, she came over to where I was sitting and took up a chair...
            That day she immediately broached the subject of the Presidensity's Council of Economic Advisors. "And what the hell is the magic power of this Wealth of Nation's rag? You'd think it was something like the Book of Revelations is for the Evangels. From the way these economystical liars talk, Artz, you'd think this Smith boy was the original old Adam from whom all our blessings flow."
            …As her last load of clothes fell awkwardly to the downwind side of the drier, Eve paused to make one final observation. "The current bucketload of economic experts got so tied up caring for the wealth of the nation's rich donor class that they don't know crap about the health of the nation's real-world population. All they know is money. And they look to money as the only solution because it's easy to add and subtract and run the numbers through their damn computers. Any professor who can make Trump's economy look good for you and me, Artzie, is nothing but a high-class conman. Maybe an e-con man, but a shyster and a liar to boot, and serving the biggest hucksters in the roost."
            Then she shook out her clothes, folded 'em neatly, put 'em in her basket and left. I wasn't sure whether the distinct smell of singe was from an overheated drier or something else, but after she left in a bustle, I went to work on my own stuff, checking to see that the bedclothes were actually dry and such as that.
            Suddenly she burst back in through the double doors, her right hand up with one accusing finger raised. "I was just about to the turn the key when I thought of something else, dammit. Their economics is about as much a scientific study of how economies function as pornography is a science of the Art of Loving — it can tell you how to maximize orgasm and ejaculation, but it tells you flat-out nothin' at all about how to express your feelings of love for others, or how to cultivate joy and mutual support, or anything else that's really important about the subject. Making money — and that mostly for people who don't need it — is not the only purpose of economic action. It isn't why people put together an economic system in the first place."
            Then she was gone. Her tires screeled as she backed out of her parking place, threw the truck into drive, and headed out of town. Eve has a farm off the shoulder of the mountain south of Cocorico. Raises goats and scarce breeds of pouter pigeons. She and Caroline swap food stuffs, recipes, and opinions, and share a common fury about the failures of Americans to uphold their theories of government. Fella like me is lucky to listen in…
            It seemed to me she'd packed a good deal of commonsense and uncommon observation into a dangerously small space, and that unpacking her smart aleck remarks ran the risk of a small-scale explosion. The longer I studied on it, the righter she looked to me.
            The notion that so-called Neo-Liberal Economics is somehow a settled 'scientific' understanding of anything is pure hooey. Neoliberal Economics is just a political program for the dominance of the monied classes' biggest winners, a kind of ad campaign made up of informercials designed to seduce the unthinking hedonists who dominate the moneyed population.
            But as a science of economics, Neoliberal economic thought is like if you based the science of Biology on the study of the fourteen most successful predators in Earth's history. You could reach out to some parts of the rest of life in an attempt to understand, for example, those predators' food preferences. But you would interpret all living phenomena through the interests, needs, and behaviors of the chosen predators. And I guarantee you would leave out most of real, living life…
            And don't try to deny it — Americans' knowledge of what we are constantly told is the all important issue of the Economy!!!
is almost always nothing more than some numbers coming from some experts we never really know, who get their figures from sources that are unclear, and which are then manipulated by processes we can't even conceive of. And we'd be equally justified to nod and feel safe if Professor Greenspan were to pull a bunny rabbit out his top hat, check out the fur on its tummy and announce that the Economy is ready to reproduce profits at an exemplary rate of growth. That's how much we really care about understanding the E-con game.
            …the truth is that these high-paid and sanctifried e-conomystics, these priests of the numbers of the beast, who administer confession, penance, and first and last rites for our political system ... by and large these guys don't know squat about economic systems as whole and living, integral parts of human reality. They don't know and they don't care. For them, the money's the thing. Money…is easily made into a number. And numbers can be run. (Well, you say, so can bulls. But numbers are cleaner and more compressed.) What the public gets are statements about growth in numbers, declines in numbers, large numbers of numbers, numbers as percentages of numbers, and numbers as the purefried Crisco oil from which the Truth is cooked as sure as whale oil for candles was cooked from blubber in the trypots of the Pequod.
            But no human activity (other than the mechanized activities of number crunchers) is just a question of numbers. An economic system is not just some numerical construction of inputs and outputs of numbers of dollars. If it was, there'd be no need for people to be involved at all: computers could take over and invest money for themselves, and win and lose at stock market betting, and pay bills for electricity consumed by the system's computations, and so on. There could still be sales and purchases of fictitious goods and services; would still be winners and losers; there would still be the slow and steady concentration of ever-larger amounts of money at the top (that is, at those junctures where money began accumulating early in the game). And maybe this sort of self-sustaining system is what the e-conomystics are secretly cultivating — since if we continue on the present track for another couple hundred years, there may not be any living people to be involved. Still the money-makers could endure (assuming robotics had progressed to the point that machines could keep the electricity on).
            No, the obsession with money as the meaning of economics is due to two factors (1) the numbers can be computed by computers (whereas real things are actually kind of resistant to that treatment), and (2) money is the medium for the wealth of a nation's wealthy.
And those academic economystics are really just high-level employees in the rich man's specialized service industry, pool boys (as it were) hired to assure that the filter systems and circulation pumps are kept in working order. Economics became the source of a sort of game-keepers handbook to guide the decisions of those favored peasants responsible for seeing to it that there are always plenty of pheasants, rabbits, and grouse available for the Lords' entertainment and delectation, never mind what this may do to the Commons where most folks make their livelihood…