The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Sister Mary Annette and Shakespeare’s Ambiguous Advice

    “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel”: Sister Mary Annette read Hamlet to our 8th grade class, and since Polonius’s advice had the imprimatur of both Sister and Shakespeare, we took it to be infallible. Sister’s point, if not Polonius’s, was that we would all wind up friendless, friends dropping like flies as we evolved into our self-centered young adult lives, this being the way of the world, and thus if we were lucky enough to hatch a true friend, we should latch on to them. But who wants to be grappled with a hoop of steel? One grapples an antagonist, but one’s friend?

    Why did Shakespeare feed so much seemingly sage advice to the mouths of fops or bumbling fools? There’s an argument over Polonius – was he shrewd or foolish? But when it comes to the play, as Harold Bloom observes, “It is very difficult to generalize about Hamlet, because every observation will have to admit its opposite” (409).

    Perhaps our aversion to grappling hooks explains our independence. And here’s another piece of Polonius advice, and where would today’s bankers and the stimulus package be if we adhered to it?: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” This Polonius pearl is often repeated without the character’s explanation: “For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” The stimulus package is the thing wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the banker king. It’s not clear that Polonius follows his own advice, for “Give thy thoughts no tongue” he ignores, though he does “Give every man thy ear”; in fact, that’s his undoing.

    Though our 8th grade long preceded Facebook, perhaps Sister foreshadowed Facebook’s hoops. She also read to us that year A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield (her favorite Copperfield characters were Mr. Micawber and Mr. Dick, whose optimistic and practical advice always found an appropriate place in our classroom), so we had more on our minds than old Polonius. Alas, we cannot befriend Mary Annette now in this Facebook, but she knew, as did Shelly, that “We look before and after, And pine for what is not.” Of Facebook, she surely would remind us of the closing of Act III, scene iii, that “Words without thoughts never to Heaven go,” and who would know better than a murderous king?

  • Grammar Shock: Person, Tense, Time, and Sense

    For most of us, grammar is like electricity; we use it all the time, usually correctly, but we don’t really know what it is or how it works, but we do know it can be dangerous. We wouldn’t want to discuss inflection while standing barefoot in a pool of water, or mix tenses when changing fuses.

    We are advised in a discussion of  the verb paradigm, in Huddleston and Pullum’s English Grammar, that “The relation between tense and time in English…is by no means straightforward.” I never doubted it, but it’s always nice to hear that your hunches have friends.

    And so it came as no surprise to find Roger Angell, in the February 15 & 22 issue of the New Yorker, in what he calls “another strange journalistic effort,” mixing memory and desire and person and tense, a dangerous business. “We are getting ahead of ourselves,” Angell says, slipping into first person plural, in what might be an imitation in present time or a nostalgic nod to his stepfather, E. B. White, and a tradition that he apparently disliked but that came to define a certain style and journalistic era. (I read recently somewhere of some editor taking out the old knob and tube of White’s first person plurals and replacing them with modern conduit; we trust they wore gloves).

    Angell switches person in his present piece in part because like his subject, “Mac [St. Clair McKelway],” he “knew them when.” And, as Angell deftly illustrates in his piece, keeping one’s tense and person straight is basic to nursing our sanity, particularly during wartime, but as well afterwards when we might be haunted by the decisions and indecisions that changed our lives forever. “It keeps you awake at night,” Angell says (now hiding behind the second person), after he’s diagnosed that sleep deprivation was no doubt a major contribution to “Mac’s madness, Mac’s fugue – let’s call it a flight, in this story….” Just so, English Grammar points out that “The usual definition found in grammar books and dictionaries says simply that the past tense expresses or indicates a time that is in the past. But things are nothing like as straightforward as that. The relation between grammatical category of past tense and semantic property of making reference to past time is much more subtle.”

    There is a tense, most usefully expressed in music, but sometimes also in writing, where we can’t seem to locate our precise situation in time. The inflections all come together into one person and tense that seems some crazy mix-up of all possible persons and tenses. Perhaps this tense is properly called sleep. But when you can’t sleep, it’s called ungrammatical, a kind of linguistic power surge.

  • Super Bowl Debriefing: the Tribal Culture of Television

    McLuhan explains that the printing press created the individual, while television returns us to the tribal. No one’s on the margins watching television. You’re either in or you’re out, and games on television up the ante. “Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture” (1964, p. 208). Art is magic, transference, transubstantiation of the base metals of our daily lives into something beyond us, beyond the daily bread and the process that brings bread to the table. Literacy, McLuhan argued, created individual point of view, eliminating the tribal view that was all inclusive. Games return individuals to a tribal mode, creating a “situation contrived to permit simultaneous participation of many people in some significant pattern of their own corporate lives” (p. 216). Games on television are a nonliterate art form.

    Turn on the TV, put the game on, and join the crowd. The TV screen is a mosaic of dots compelling audience participation: no knitting, no reading – everyone’s paying attention. TV works like a cartoon drawing; the viewer sees only a few of the many dots and must fill in the rest. TV is all at once and ongoing, unlike a book, which is sequential, like a long train ride, each passenger in a private, individual seat. TV performs its violence by capturing the viewer, who can not turn away.

    McLuhan explains why baseball is individual and literate and a poor game to watch on TV while football is tribal and all inclusive and trumps baseball as a TV sport: “The characteristic mode of the baseball game is that it features one-thing-at-a-time. It is a lineal, expansive game which, like golf, is perfectly adapted to the outlook of an individualist and inner-directed society. Timing and waiting are of the essence, with the entire field in suspense waiting upon  the performance of a single player. By contrast, football, basketball, and ice hockey are games in which many events occur simultaneously, with the entire team involved at the same time. With the advent of TV, such isolation of the individual performance as occurs in baseball became unacceptable” (p. 284). The players in football are non-specialists (compared to the players in baseball). The team moves at once, together, in the same direction. All the players are viewed on the screen at once – this is almost impossible to do with a TV camera at a baseball game.

    Baseball is a snooze on television, while football is an ecstatic TV game. Baseball is slow, the game of languorous summer, like reading a book. The reader can put the book down and pick it up again later; there’s no clock, so there’s no need for an official time out. In baseball offense, the players sit in the darkened dugout like unread pages in a book, while on the TV gridiron the all inclusiveness is all involving as both offense and defense assume their roles simultaneously.

    The popularity of baseball is declining, as reading is declining, and for the same reason. Football’s ascendance in popularity parallels and mimics what’s happening in the culture, the increasing need for a game that is all inclusive, tribal in nature, and an all-at-once experience – a game that is nonliterate.

    McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: New American Library.

  • The Value of Time and Pressure

    A lump of coal has more intrinsic value than the far more expensive diamond it might someday become. Part of the value of diamonds derives from their rareness, but a diamond’s value comes primarily from the desires of a particular community, whose members want to sparkle and cut the glass eyes of their friends with envy, and believe in metaphor.

    But diamonds are easy. The girl’s best friend can be purchased, pocketed, and sported away in a short shopping spree, later slid slowly onto the empty, waiting finger at the top of some Ferris wheel. Rhinestones are a guy’s quick getaway; there’s a reason the girl wants the real thing, as Marilyn Monroe and Emmylou Harris sing in “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” lyrics cued from the Anita Loos novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, writing in Psychology Today (2008, May 29), explains the friendship: “The courtship gift for the purpose of screening dads from cads must not only be costly but also lack intrinsic value. Diamonds make excellent courtship gifts from this perspective because they are simultaneously very expensive and lack intrinsic value.”

    Kanazawa doesn’t mention the Styne and Robin movie lyrics or the Loos novel, and his explanation doesn’t quite seem to square with the original lyrics: “Men grow cold / As girls grow old, / And we all lose our charms in the end. / But square-cut or pear-shaped, / These rocks don’t loose their shape. / Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” But Kanazawa argues “Of course, diamonds and flowers are beautiful, but they are beautiful precisely because they are expensive and lack intrinsic value, which is why it is mostly women who think flowers and diamonds are beautiful. Their beauty lies in their inherent uselessness; this is why Volvos and potatoes are not beautiful.” This is not psychology; it’s advertising. The smart, working class mom won’t buy it. She knows it takes time, pressure, and heat to turn her lump of coal into a diamond. A diamond can be purchased in the heat of the moment with a piece of plastic; it takes time and pressure and heat to turn a lump of coal relationship into a marriage.

    Time and pressure have intrinsic value, but value that can’t be easily purchased or traded. It took J. D. Salinger ten years to write The Catcher in the Rye. It took James Joyce seven years to write Ulysses and seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake. But here we are online, where the demand is for speed and constant change, instant access, diamonds without a hard core process. We want instant gratification: flipping houses and cars; constantly checking stock prices and email; texting our latest thoughts without giving them time to simmer and develop. We want instant success, so it’s instant success that we’ve come to value. We’ve become a culture of quickie junkies.

    Yet we are each of us a lump of coal in the process of becoming a diamond. A diamond is hard and pure and difficult to adulturate; it takes a lifetime to turn a marriage into a diamond, and you can’t wear it on your finger. We should not value diamonds – it’s too easy; we should value time and pressure. And if we value time and pressure, we’re more likely to realize the diamonds that we are, that we have already become – through wear and tear, through life-learning experience, through the pressure and time required to go back to school, to try something new, to forget and forgive and let go – to value our own experience. Then, after all that time underground, we surface with the epiphany, and it feels sudden, but we “…know my song well before I start singing” (Dylan), realizing the opportunity to do what we were born to do, realizing the diamond that is buried deep in our lump of coal, as Paul Potts, 2007 Got Talent winner, explains. The soul is not a diamond; the soul is a lump of coal.

    Notes: The photo used in this post can be found at the Library of Congress site, in their American Memory collection, under “Culture, Folklife.” The Paul Potts reference (follow link) is to a mini-doc. video of his performance. After his song, Judge Amanda Holden says she thinks Potts is “a little lump of coal going to turn into a diamond.”

  • On the Trail of Diaper Fish Wraps and Hot Hot Dogs

    Larissa MacFarquhar’s “Busted” (New Yorker, Feb 1) opens and closes with dialog, a kind of journalistic Roddy Doyle: “Crrrcchh,” in which everything is revealed and nothing is resolved. The spool is running, and we are told that New York City’s Department of Investigation is on the prowl, overseeing those on the make. The DOI’s apparently a productive unit. They “arrested a group of sanitation inspectors…they arrested half the city’s taxi inspectors…they infiltrated a gang of parking-meter attendants.”

    The central drama of the piece focuses on the sidewalk food vendor industry. Inspections and permits of the food carts fuel a thriving underground economy. And no wonder: “Food venders [sic] can make a hundred thousand dollars a year,” MacFarquhar says. Yet a permit cost only a couple hundred bucks, but since they are limited and distributed by lottery might be sold on the black market for thousands. Calling the vendors an industry is not hyperbolic: According to a Slate article (Simons, Aug 12) “A hot dog vendor was kicked from the curb outside New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art last week for failure to pay his monthly rent—of $53,558.” So no surprise the vendors have organized into the Street Vendor Project, providing education, support, and outreach for some 10,000 street vendors working in the city.

    I’m not thinking of opening a food cart, in spite of the obvious potential for profits, but I do occasionally, out on one jaunt or another, smell and contemplate the odd hot dog, sense the greasy-good butter soaking up a bag of popcorn, see the summer day in a spool of cotton candy. What would it be like to step up to the cart and order one, I wonder, and then to actually eat it?

    The potential for profitable characters attracts the entrepreneurial writer. In Roddy Doyle’s hilarious The Van, the unemployed Barrytown Dubliners have purchased a used food vendor van with a fryer on board and have outfitted it as a fish and chips restaurant on wheels: “It’s not fish, said Bimbo. – …What is it? – It’s white, said Jimmy Sr. – It’s a nappy! The man told him. – Wha’!… – He’s righ’, Jimmy, said Bimbo – it’s a Pamper; folded up. My God, that’s shockin’. – Shut up! Jimmy Sr hissed at him. – I must have put it in the batter – Shut up! – What is it? said Sharon. The man wasn’t angry-looking now; he looked like he needed comfort.”

    And then there’s John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius, the anti-hero of A Confederacy of Dunces. Ignatius works for a time for Paradise Vendors, pushing a hot dog cart around the quarters of New Orleans. But he seems to eat more hot dogs himself than he sells to customers. And having eaten his stock, he concocts a story about being robbed to explain the situation to his boss: “How much money did he get?” “Money? No money was stolen. After all, there was no money to steal, for I had not been able to vend even one of these delicacies. He stole the hot dogs.” Later, Ignatius is under investigation by the inspection board: “They seen you picking a cat out the gutter on St. Joseph Street.” “It was a rather appealing calico. I offered it a hot dog. However, the cat refused to eat it. It was an animal with some taste and decency.” 

    The sidewalk food vendor business is full of characters and complicities; indeed, what business is not?

  • Nicholson Baker, Nicholas Carr, and Googling Clothespins

    Nicholas Carr might argue I got stupider this week, and I admit that I did spend more time than usual on Google. Carr’s influential Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (July, 2008), has been picked up by the English teaching gaggle to promote reading. I’m going to save that argument for another time and place. One of the first to use Carr’s article, I did not use it to promote reading, but to discuss the elements of argument; for now, I want to explain why I spent more time than usual on Google this week, and show what I found. The first is easy to explain; I discovered Google Patents. The second is easy to show – clothespins. Here’s what happened.

    I came across one of my old Joseph Mitchell tri-folded reporter note sheets and realized I had never followed up on a note I had made to research a section in Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, a novel about a procrastinating poet, whose ruminations, while stalling to write an introduction to a new poetry anthology he’s put together and found a publisher for, produce, in the end, the introduction itself. My note was to research something I found interesting on page 116 of Baker’s novel. Baker’s poet, Paul Chowder, staggers into a discussion of clothespins, and makes this claim: “There was a factory in Vanceborough, Maine, that made eight hundred clothespins a minute in 1883.”

    I boarded Google but failed to find the factory. Growing stupider by the minute, I looked up clothespins in Wiki, where a claim is made that the Shakers invented the clothespin, but they didn’t patent their inventions. Patented or not, it would seem that the clothespin, technologically an extension (as McLuhan might explain) of the human finger and thumb clamp, must surely predate the Shakers.

    The paperclip might be an evolutionary relative of the clothespin, as shown by my research in Google patents. To the left, is a drawing of a patent by A. W. Burch, dated July 2, 1907. The pin is made of wire, and appears to have been inspired by the paperclip.

    Many patents seek to improve upon ideas already patented and manufactured; for example, Roy V. Shackelford, of Long Beach, California, was granted a patent in 1939 for a clothespin that “attached to a line in such a manner that the clothes which are fastened in the pin never come in actual contact with the clothes line.”

    Sarah J. Miley, in 1898, wrote a patent that discouraged traditional one piece bifurcated wood clothespins from splitting in half, through the addition of a metal  “stay plate” in the handle end (drawing left).

    It might have been a stupid week, but I will never look at a clothespin the same again, nor a paperclip, for that matter, nor the possibilities for the extensions of the human for inventions that we call technology.

    As for Nicholson Baker’s factory, how many clothespins do we need? The answer to that might be found in A. R. Stewart’s invention (drawing below), patented in 1874. It’s not a clothespin; it’s a machine to make clothespins. The Shakers didn’t need to patent their clothespin because they had no intention of mass producing and marketing it; if they needed another clothespin, they would simply make a new one. Manufacturing, like specialization, leads to extinctions.

    Stewart’s patent application, titled “Improvement in Machines for Making Clothes-pins,” does not mention the number of clothespins the machine is capable of producing per minute, but instead describes a machine “capable of forming a perfect clothes-pin at each downward movement of the saw and cutters, and, as the finished pins are removed by the same upon their upward stroke, no other attention is necessary except to supply the blanks to the hopper.” The improvement seems to be found not in the quantity of clothespins produced, but in the saving of labor required to produce them. I thought of Melville’s Bartleby: Ah technology! Ah, humanity!

  • Where Listening Gives Rise to Silence and Fizzles

    There lived in our neighborhood some time ago a locally famous pianist who enjoyed great demand for piano lessons from parents for their children. The demand was such that a prospective student had to interview with the teacher. One of the interview “questions” involved listening to chords: the child identified a chord as “happy” or “sad.” Children unable to pass this interview question eliminated themselves from consideration. It’s been some time since I’ve talked to the pianist, but I’ve wondered from time to time what emotion a Bm7b5 (B minor 7 flat 5) might equate to, or an Eb7b9 (E flat 7 flat 9, as an inside chord, without the 5th, on the guitar).

    How one distinguishes sounds, as in the experiment discussed over at Language Log, might explain musical preferences. Listeners who prefer a country western song, such as Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (and its many covers), over a short piece by John Cage, might not hear sounds the same way the Cage fan distinguishes sounds, for “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (Blake, “Proverbs of Hell”) – as both Williams and Cage would probably agree.

    The Language Log listening experiment might also explain reading preferences, why some readers, for example, prefer Charles Dickens to Samuel Beckett (Dickens writes in minor keys, invoking pathos and bathos and every other kind of oath, Beckett in jovial major modes with flurries of flats falling like ash in downward spiraling scales).

    Emergence might be at work here, too (the entire piece can’t be predicted by any one of its chords), or simply that our ears sometimes grow tired or lazy, as do our tongues and our eyes. This is what Cage explored in Silence, and what Beckett meant by Fizzles.

  • Our 2009 Believer Book Award Choices

    For the third year in a row, we’ve submitted our Believer magazine postcard, casting our vote for the three “…most affecting and well-wrought, the bravest and the best written” works of fiction published in the US in the previous year. After last year’s faceless-woman postcard contest, suggested by readers’ spontaneous, unsolicited art work on previous years’ cards, the Believer has changed postcards; this year’s card attempts to cover an art work that seems a bit cluttered for the small-sized card. We added some spontaneous art to the backside. In any case, here are our picks for 2009:

    The Halfway House, by Guillermos Rosales. The underclass at work. Introduction by Jose Manuel Prieto, translated from Spanish by Anna Kushner, in a New Directions Paperbook Original: $14.95 (121 pages).

    The Skating Rink, by Roberto Bolano. Writer as detective at work. Translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews. Another New Directions book: $21.95 (hardback, 182 pages).

     The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker. Poet at work. Simon & Schuster: $25.00 (243 pages).

    All three available at Multnomah County Library.

    2008 picks.

    2007 picks.

  • Plato, Pablo, and the Poetics of Health Care

    Plato considered poets dangerous and banned them from his Republic, and Il Postino (1994) illustrates his point, yet also shows that we are all poets, all who use language – to love and berate, to tackle and persuade, to testify and exhort. The movie, from the book Burning Patience, by Antonio Skarmeta, a fiction set on an island of Pablo Neruda’s temporary exile, is about the democracy of language, how metaphor permeates our lives, and the consequences inherent in desiring more than our own voices can bear, even through poetry. 

    Is contemporary poetry outside the margins of popular US culture? Maybe, but the creation of metaphor is still the heart of language and language the heart of culture. In the film, this is ironically dramatized by Aunt Rosa. During her hilarious visit to Pablo to complain of his contributing to the poetic delinquency of Beatrice, she lets loose with an invective that ably employs a fishnet of metaphors to describe Pablo’s bad influence on Mario and Mario’s hypnotizing effect on her niece. The blame falls on the poet for stirring the emotions of the tainted republic of the island. 

    Poetry sleeps around, moving through Plato’s five regimes. Democracy gives way to tyranny; Plato should have banned lobbyists – then maybe the Republic, though awash in a bath of poetry, might at least have a decent health care system, not to mention an adequate water supply.

  • Breakfast at Beckett’s

    In their engagement of the studies referenced on the declining level of happiness of Americans, Becker-Posner begin to wrestle with the difficulty of quantifying for economics study human behavior as a market influence.

    Late last night, after class, happy with a bowl of homemade chocolate ice cream, I flipped on Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on the Sundance Channel, and it occurred to me that perhaps the unhappiness of Americans has something to do with its writers, for a culture can only be as happy as its artists. We have, of course, come to confuse celebrity with art, and anyone can achieve celebrity status. Our ballplayers might be considered artists. But our insistence that they be heroes both on the field and in the museum results in a collusion of unhappiness.

    Where our novelists are concerned, where the great American novel remains an elusive grail, the unhappy string of strikeouts has all but emptied the stands. Consider the Lost Generation hopefuls, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald; substituted with the failed promises of Vidal, Mailer, and Capote; and the newest crop, including Vollmann and now Keith Gessen, whose All the Sad Young Literary Men imagines nothing less than the success of unhappy celebration, yet at least does so without the usual self-delusion of greatness.

    I flipped the movie off and headed to bed but first grabbed an old copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s off the shelf. In the book, unlike the movie, Holly has already gone lightly, leaving a heavy absence in her wake – the rest is flashback, beginning with “Her dispraising eyes surveyed the room again. ‘What do you do here all day?’ I motioned toward a table tall with books and paper. ‘Write things.’…‘Tell me, are you a real writer?’ ‘It depends on what you mean by real.’ ‘Well, darling, does anyone buy what you write?’ ‘Not yet.’”

    And so on, until this morning when I pulled Samuel Beckett’s Molloy off a shelf. Too many think Beckett a despairing, desperate, depressing writer, but I’ve never thought that. He’s nothing of course like Capote, who, nevertheless, as Beckett commented on his own fate upon receiving the Nobel, was also “Damned to Fame.” But we must remember not to confuse narrators with authors; in those cases where the narrator is the author, yet the book is still called fiction, I think of the self-conscious infielder who can’t get his mind off his last throwing error.

    Turn to any page in Molloy and count the number of times the word “I” appears. It’s extraordinary, each page, held at a distance, so that the I’s stand out, like some iconic, Concrete poem.

  • Becker, Posner, and the Pursuit of Happiness

    Don’t miss the Chicago Two waxing on happiness in the latest posts at the Becker-Posner blog; the January 10 posts are impoverished economic analyses attempting to explain why Americans are unhappy. Neither the Nobel economist nor the federal judge seems happy with his conclusions.

    Even as they both begin to move away from the Chicago School’s famed ignorance of psychology, the problem still seems to be with their approach, as John Cassidy explains in his January 8, New Yorker article, “After the Blowup”: “A useful new economics will need to integrate an awareness of human nature with extensive practical knowledge and high-level mathematical expertise” (32). It’s not that an attempt to explain human nature is lacking in the Becker-Posner posts. They both conclude that the pursuit of wealth is the paramount claim of value for Americans, but they ignore their colleague Rajan’s argument “that the initial causes of the breakdown [the recent crash] were stagnant wages and rising inequality” (32-33), that upward mobility, in other words, is a metaphorical, ultimately unreachable carrot, for as one moves upward, so does the top.

    Their analyses do not mention half-day commutes in mortgaged, gas-expensive rigs to institutionalized jobs (public and private) so Dad can pay the mortgage and Mom get the health benefits and pay for daycare until the divorce where everyone gets the Community Chest card that says “Return to Go.” Posner argues in his conclusion that “People have a strong preference for more income over less and thus for a rising standard of living. Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that people fooled themselves in thinking they would be happier with more money. Maybe so; but as long as people do have this strong preference, economics can explain a great deal of human behavior.” The faulty assumption in Posner’s argument is the claim that more income leads to an improved standard of living. Rising income results in rising costs of living and a breakeven that continues to move upward, like the unreachable carrot.

    Becker seems closer to reality: “My conclusion is that happiness data have been useful, and the relation with income is plausible. Yet happiness data do not enable us to directly measure utility and wellbeing. I admit I do not know why average degree of happiness has not risen in recent decades in the US as incomes rose.”

    Posner gives Adam Smith short shrift, for Smith is much more devastating in his argument than merely suggesting that “people fool themselves”: No doubt we do fool ourselves, about many things, but about money buying happiness the fooling is an aggressive and dynamic belief, not passive and benign, a belief that requires as a tenet a dichotomy of human worth. This belief is what allows some of us to live comfortably in mansions paid for by the labor in sweatshops of people who live in shanties: Smith says, “This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.” This is at least evident in the gated communities that sprung up in response to a new age of fear fostered by the holders of the carrots to secure their own positions of power and wealth, increasing the gap between the claim of value and its reason and exposing the underlying faulty assumption that wealth buys happiness, for as Tennessee Ernie Ford sang in Merle Travis’s classic “Sixteen Tons” (1955):

    “You load sixteen tons, what do you get / Another day older and deeper in debt / Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go / I owe my soul to the company store.”