Why Go to Prison?

by James Livingston

Thu Jul 24, 2008

I've known this kid since he and my son played soccer together and I yelled at his father for running onto the field--I was one of the coaches, I got to yell a lot, at the kids and the parents, it was a great pleasure, especially since I didn't know a goddamn thing about soccer, having never played the benighted sport.      

Why Go to Prison?

by James Livingston

Thu Jul 24, 2008

I've known this kid since he and my son played soccer together and I yelled at his father for running onto the field--I was one of the coaches, I got to yell a lot, at the kids and the parents, it was a great pleasure, especially since I didn't know a goddamn thing about soccer, having never played the benighted sport.      

Battle Rattle

by James Livingston

Sat Jul 19, 2008

Good question.  I don't have an answer, except the gift economy funded by the muse who happens to be animating your erotic impulses-not just your sexual, genital inclinations, no, I mean those larger energies that bind you to the world elsewhere.  Don't get me wrong, I think the thing is worth reading, hell, I've already sent it off to the series editor and to a couple of friends.  Even so, where did it come from?

Curt on TV

by jmgabriel

Mon Jul 14, 2008

Part one: http://www.kcci.com/video/1682...

Part two: http://www.kcci.com/video/1682...

Thoughts?

Pennsylvania, a Third World Country

by James Livingston

Sun Jul 13, 2008

According to Mapquest, it's 165 miles from here on Edgecombe to Lancaster; Google says 135 miles.  I can tell you that even if traffic is not snarled on the GW, it takes three and a half hours either way.  Here's what I saw, learned, or confirmed in making this round trip.

Coogan's Bluff

by James Livingston

Thu Jul 10, 2008

It is manifested in the jaw, it moves sideways, it contains but is not just a grimace, and now the squint also moves sideways, as if the hero is one of us, another student being berated by a principal.  He's not staring anybody down, he's letting his mind wander because he doesn't want to be in the room with the authorities.

Genealogies Come Easy

by James Livingston

Mon Jul 07, 2008

Now Madison was the center of my intellectual universe once I understood the genealogies-DeKalb, Illinois, the strange site of Northern Illinois University, was descended from, and legitimated by, that hallowed place in the annals of American academe, where Turner, Goldberg, Current, Jensen, Harrington, Beale, Curti, Williams, and other giants taught my advisors, Parrini and Sklar.  

Sub-Optimization

by Paul Wolman

Wed Jul 02, 2008

Kristol, Bill, Persuasion

by James Livingston

Thu Jul 03, 2008

Radicals and conservatives in America have typically defined their respective positions by their stance toward the Declaration, and thus toward the Constitution.  For example, in the 19th century, the abolitionists embraced the ethical principle of equality enunciated in the Declaration, and denounced the historical circumstance--the compromise with slavery--inscribed in the Constitution.

Your Brother Is Gone

by James Livingston

Wed Jul 02, 2008

------------------------------------------------
Your brother is gone now,
He's headed for home,
What will he say when he gets there,
When he's finally alone.
.
It's a question worth asking
With the tools put away,
When the TV's still blaring
And you want to pray.

You imagine the answer,
You're also alone,
You stare at a flat screen,
You're already gone.

You know how this ended
The last time you tried,
It was a disaster
You might as well die.

But what would you die for?
Your family, your friends?
You already know better,
You know how this ends.

Hear a bang, not a whimper,
This ends with a gun,
Could be a disaster
But it's already done.

Try to welcome this ending,
It forbids all your fears,
You can't try to outlive it,
There are too many tears.

You don't have to go gentle,
But don't feel any fright,
It's another beginning
You can turn out the light.

Love and Theft

by James Livingston

Sun Jun 29, 2008

The truck is worth about nothing, OK, a thousand bucks on a trade, the CD player might get the dumb bunny 50 bucks, so I can't take it personally.  Good riddance.

If I hadn't decided against doctor's orders and started running again, I wouldn't have known until tomorrow, but there I am trotting down Edgecombe today, going past my own vehicle, and the window is gone, so I have to ask myself, why is my window gone?  Nah, it's not water flowing underground.  Better answers available.

But here's the thing I love about this theft.  I've been hauling a Weber kettle grill back and forth for weeks--where am I going to put this dirty thing?--and it's still on its side, all the parts available, its cooking capacity intact.  It's worth much more than the CD player ripped out of the dash.  The guy doesn't cook?  He doesn't cook outside?  I gotta know the story.

I guess it's the crushing force of the market.  We'll see if it's still there tomorrow.  The  Weber grill, that is.  But now that I mention it, we'll see if the market is still there.

Right on Red

by James Livingston

Thu Jun 26, 2008

So there I am this morning at exactly 9:30, snaking my way, very slowly, up 158th toward St. Nicholas, because everybody is doubled-parked, the street cleaners and the police are on their way.  You have to move your vehicle from the southbound side of thoroughfares like Edgecombe for street cleaning between 9:30 and 11:00 on Mondays and Thursdays, otherwise it's a $45 ticket.  

I'm planning on turning right onto St. Nicholas, then double parking on 162nd until 11:00, so I slide through the crosswalk, looking left for traffic, and I match eyelines with an NYPD specimen.

He turns back to the paperwork in his tiny little traffic vehicle, and jerks his thumb backward, meaning, I take it, to move backward, so I roll down the window, and say, "Officer, I'm going to turn right on red here, so I need some visibility."

"You stay in that crosswalk and you're getting a summons.  Back up.  Whaddayou mean, right on red, where do you think you live?"

"Well, in Jersey you can do that," I say, "also in Illinois and California, you can turn right on red there, North Carolina, too, I'm pretty sure, I lived there for a while."

"Where are you right now, are you in Jersey," he asks, "or are you in New York City?  North Carolina?  I'm on 158th Street, where do you think you are?  Move that thing outta the crosswalk or I give you a summons."

He was convincing.  I had forgotten where I was.  I backed up, put my turn signal on, waited for that light.  I still felt guilty when I double-parked on 162nd, facing the Bronx, next to the oldest residence in Manhattan.

I retrieved that thing, my truck, at 11:00, parked it on Edgecombe, and felt a lot better.  Tomorrow I don't have to move it unless Matt Friedman decides I'm driving to Jersey City to record my bizarre version of "All Along the Watchtower."

Failing in Prison

by James Livingston

Sat Jun 21, 2008

It wasn't all my fault, OK, but it was mostly mine because I wouldn't, or couldn't, pay attention to the place itself, that is, to its extremely variegated constituencies--the residents, the guards, and the administration.  I wouldn't, or couldn't, let them enter, and change, my mind.  I was going to do the right thing, and that was that.

I was about to defend my dissertation on the origins of the Fed, and I was full of ideas about the rise of corporate capitalism, having taken Marty Sklar's seminar three years before (for a semester, anyway, I dropped the second because I decided, perversely, that he was teaching us what, not how, to think about the period).  

The place had been locked down for 18 months when I arrived, expecting to do good in spite of the goddamn guards and the benighted administration.  Everybody except the warden was a tinderbox ready to explode.  It was if the guards and the residents had some fever, so everything that touched them felt like an invasion.  You know how that feels when you're running a temperature, your senses seem better attuned to the world, they're more acute, everything outside is too cold, your skin can't be touched, you recoil when it is.

But this feverish condition wasn't a disease, although it was, to be sure, socially transmitted.  Everyone in the place, guards included, had been confined under such insane circumstances that the stranger--the earnest, ignorant teacher from outside these walls--seemed a dangerous miracle to be closely observed, never trusted, something like a journalist from the North travelling in the South on the eve of the Civil War.

I was the Caucasian as well.  There was a strong nationalist presence in the place, and in the classroom, and that presence kept surfacing as questions about the role of African-Americans in the story I was telling about the rise of corporate capitalism.  I thought I was equipping future revolutionaries--weren't all prisoners political back then?--with the knowledge they needed to overthrow this dreaded mode of production, and they, the students, thought I was ignoring their history and their people.

They were right.  I might have stopped and listened, and shifted gears.  But no, I knew better than they did, I knew what they needed to know, so I pressed forward with my chosen narrative.  Until I realized that they weren't paying attention, and were figuring out ways to infuriate the guards--for example, by going to the library without me.  Twice I had to calm a library guard down by explaining that it was just a mistake.

By then, the course was irretrievable.  When I arrived to give the final, armed with two dozen Snickers bars, the place was locked down again, so I wasn't getting in.  "Fire in C Block," I was told, that's where the most violent and the most angry men served their time.  "Well, here's the final exam," I said, "And here's some candy bars for the students."

Mad Finance

by James Livingston

Fri Jun 20, 2008

What is remarkable about this piece is not so much the call for closer regulation of markets but the emphasis on income distribution as the key to a future in which "hot money"--that's what it was called in the 1920s--does not govern the allocation of resources for the planet.  

Socialism is alive and well in western civilization.  Not just here, but over there as well.

Highway to Hell

by James Livingston

Thu Jun 19, 2008

OK, I've been doing that.  The personal is political, after all.  And so forth.  Except that sometimes it ain't.

I drove out to the Mountainview Youth Correctional Facility yesterday, where my colleague Don Roden has built an amazing program that now has ten students at Rutgers, odds are that a majority will graduate.  Don has asked me to do some lectures on black nationalism out there, and I've done whatever he's asked over the last year because he's a prince and these Prisoners R US.  They're males 18 to 30 years old, they're our sons for God's sake, they're our children even though there are guys here in their forties.  Too bad they can't watch any TV except for news, imagine the ad campaigns that would capture this audience.  Did I mention that they're prisoners?

It's 50 miles one way, this drive, and here is what makes it memorable.  To begin with, expansion joints on bridges, which widen on the approaches up and down because they have a more direct relationship with the sun than the ones on top, and which make my vehicle both bounce and turn--my Mazda truck, it's called a Navajo, it's 14 years old and has 112,000 miles--when we cross one of those joints, that ancient vehicle gets high and it wants to change lanes by getting a different angle on the highway while it's in the air.

But then Mike Fennell and I drove this same old hound all the way to Veracruz, by way of Ciudad Victoria and Tampico on roads as wide as your bedroom.  Then we drove it west, right through Mexico City to Ruta 57, north to Monterey and on up to the USA.  That was September 2005, when I decided that my back needed surgery, and we turned away from our destination, Guatemala, we turned toward home, even though my Spanish vocabulary needed even more radical intervention than my spinal stenosis.

4,000 miles round trip, we went through Baton Rouge and tried to help out with the refugees who congregated in the River Center-Katrina had recently visited--and we went through south Texas, too, that third world nation pretending to be part of the United States.  We drove at night against all advice--there are still bandits out there!--because we had to, following a southbound flatbed truck carrying more weight than could get up the rolling hills and winding roads of the east coast between Tampico and Veracruz.  

I wanted to stay in Tampico, by the way, forever, because the beach is the most beautiful I've ever seen, and the town collects a little toll for the tables and chairs you can sit in as you watch the flat green water that reaches so far you can walk a half mile before you need to swim.  Maybe farther, I stood there in what felt like the Gulf Stream, and the water was only waist high.

Yes, the trip to and from Mountainview is memorable because it has nothing to do with what I'm doing and where I'm going.  Imagine that.  Or maybe it does.  One of my first real failures was a course I taught at the Stateville Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, back when I was ghost-writing for the dean and Alex the Weimaraner was.eating everything and learning how to save food without refrigeration.  

My first day at Stateville, the guards put me in an orange jumpsuit, and they did it with anger, they wanted to make a point--I had jeans on, "denim," as it was called before inmates had matching pants and shirts, in the days when inmates wore blue jeans and light blue shirts.  When I got to the education compound, one of the students said, "Hey man, you're back, where you been?"  I was already convinced I'd never leave.

I met Eddie Ligon that day, he was the man, I was told, who ran the Blackstone Rangers from prison.  It was a Chicago gang that was already evolving into something else--think Black Panthers, or, in a different context, Hamas or Hezbollah.  Eddie was a tall skinny guy, incredibly charismatic, but he would not be running the thing for long from there.  All the residents--that's what I was told to call them, not inmates, not prisoners--had been locked down for 18 months, largely because the administration of the prison had been trying to break the gangs, particularly the Blackstone Rangers.  

The Cubs are on, I will tell you about my failure tomorrow.  

What is Called Thinking in Carnegie Hall?

by James Livingston

Tue Jun 17, 2008

It was our first time in Carnegie Hall.  Neither of us had ever been inside the place, and now we've played the roles of both audience and performer it so graciously allows.

It is a beautiful space, much smaller than I imagined and very colorful, and I mean this literally, there are bright red and gold accents, bunting, and ornaments everywhere you look.  The aisles are wide, the seats are more than ample, the slope down to the stage is gentle, gradual.  The place feels generous, welcoming, forgiving; somehow it moves.

Andy and the choir sang for 24 minutes, and I cried almost the whole way through.  Sacred music has this peculiar effect on me.  It reminds me of the transcendence each of us wants, and needs, and will not have until we are at one with God--that is, dead.  Longing for that union is, in this sense, a longing for death, a way of reading for the ending of your own life, a way of knowing the final truth.

So sacred music is, in a more exact sense, metaphysics set to music.  Maybe that's why it makes me cry.  

"Why should I love God better than this day?"  That was Whitman's question.  Asking it over and over--not out loud, this was a concert--helped me get through the music without sobbing like a motherless child.

In his "Song for Occupations," from Leaves of Grass, Whitman asked the same question another way.  After a long list of "the closest simplest things" within everyday routine--it goes on for four pages, it's mostly tools and transactions--he concludes:

"In them the heft of the heaviest. . .in them far more than you estimated, and far less also. . ..

I do not affirm what you see beyond is futile . . .I do not advise you to stop,
I do not say leadings you though great are not great,
But I say that none lead to greater or sadder or happier than those lead to.

Will you seek far off?  Surely you come back at last."

Will you seek far off?  The last song the choir did was a gospel blues, and everybody on stage, all white folk from an affluent suburb of Chicago, was suddenly moving, in time, dancing, almost, and then clapping, too.  It was embarrassing to watch, except that everybody in the audience was also clapping, so it was wonderful to hear.  

There is no transcendence available in that condition of physical engagement.  So Nietzsche was right, there is no "No" in music?  No, he's wrong, the refusal of transcendence is specific to certain kinds of music, and they emerge very late in the 19th century, just about the time he's getting over Wagner.

Just about the same time William James is getting over metaphysics.

Welcome to this Water

by James Livingston

Sat Jun 14, 2008

Except that today you haven't been in any body of water.  

No, that's not it, either, the water's been all over you, but you were just walking down the street, and the fire hydrant was open, and the kids standing around it know how to direct its spray, so when they see you coming, you're walking your brother to the subway, he's on his way downtown, they know what to do when you take off your hat, cross the street with your arms open wide, they raise the level of the water's torrent and almost knock you down.

You're soaked either way, except that today it feels better than any ocean, and drying out is going to take longer, because on your way back, you'll board that hydrant's spray as if it were a horse, you'll laugh at the kids who control it, and they'll wonder if they should shut it down for your own good.  

You're probably not going to take a shower.  Probably not going to relax, either.  Are you?  Be honest.

Marvin Rosen is Dead

by James Livingston

Thu Jun 12, 2008

Dialogue for Jon Stewart

by James Livingston

Wed Jun 11, 2008

Anyway, I replied with the following, adding that a panel of victims will help no one understand what happened.
_________________________

Jon Stewart (JS):  So, Professor Livingston, you actually think that the housing crisis was inevitable, and you don't see a solution short of income redistribution?

James Livingston (JL):  That is correct.

JS:  Why should we believe you, do you have credentials?

JL:  There is no reason to believe me except that I'm an academic who's written on this issue.  My credentials are weak, like, uh, I'm employed by a big university and wrote, once upon a time, about the Federal Reserve.  Now I write about horror movies and feminism.

JS:  Ooh.  So, why are you here?

JL:  To explain why regulation of the financial markets is not the problem.  To explain that the big problems are, first, surplus capital not being invested in productive capacity-because it couldn't be-and second, consumer debt offset the lack of investment.  Debt, mind you, not consumer income.  It's gonna be more debt or income redistribution, those are the choices.

JS:  You lost me [shakes his head].

JL:  Give me 30 seconds?

JS:  Maybe, give it a try, I'm looking at the producers [shrugs, looks into camera].

JL:   OK, here's what happened between 2001 and 2006.  First, corporate profits increased substantially, during and after the dot.com debacle.  Second, wages did not increase.  Third, Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy delivered money to people who couldn't spend it except by handing it over to their financial advisors, who knew the housing market was booming.

Corporations did not invest their new profits, they didn't have to, they lent them to the financial sector, where hedge funds and "securitized investment vehicles" now ruled.  Meanwhile, awash in money, rich people followed their advisors into the most lucrative market, duh, into real estate.  Demand and prices for houses therefore increased--not because we all wanted to live in the Poconos--so that people whose wages were stagnating could borrow against their house or take out an equity loan, maybe even take a vacation.

In short, the "housing bubble" was driven by institutional money that had no place else to go, not by greedy or deluded borrowers.  Just like 1929.  Another structural problem.

JS:  You're kidding me, you're comparing this to the Great Depression?

JL: Yes, but Alan Greenspan has, too, so I feel, what, authorized.

Look, if corporations don't invest their increasing profits because they can't, because the enlargement of output, capacity, and productivity just happens without increasing investment, and if, as a result, consumer expenditures are the key to growth, what then?  Then all bets are off.

Then consumer expenditures become crucial to growth as such.  No withholding of income in the form of profit.  And no more deferment of gratification   Uh oh.  Sex, drugs, rock and roll.

The British Are Coming

by James Livingston

Tue Jun 10, 2008

Meanwhile the best piece I've seen on the Clinton campaign failure is from The Economist, dated June 5th, linked from The Washington Post "Politics" blog.  Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson finally get what they deserve from the press.