davydog

The original Pan-Bringer, Pandora, was sent to Earth with a jar which contained all ills; of good things, it contained only hope. Primitive man lived in this world of hope. He relied on the munificence of nature, on the handouts of gods and on the instincts of his tribe to enable him to subsist. Classical Greeks began to replace hope with expectations. Their version of Pandora let her bring and release both evils and goods. They remembered her mainly for the ills she had unleashed. And most of all, they forgot that the All-Giver was the keeper of hope.¶

They told the story of two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. The former warned the latter to leave Pandora alone, which he did not do but rather married her. In classical Greece, the name Epimetheus, which means “Hindsight” was interpreted to mean “dull” or “dumb.” The Greeks had become moral and misogynous patriarchs who panicked at the thought of the first woman. They built a rational and authoritarian society. They planned and built institutions through which they expected to cope with the rampant ills.¶

Ivan illich, Ciclo Lectures Summer 1970; Cidoc Cauderno No. 1007 (page 1/2)

We’re All Legionnaires Now

It’s not idle hands, but unconscious minds that are the devil’s workshop. Surely “Legion” is the most appropriate name for the delusional domains in which our enslaved souls and unconscious minds reside. For they are many.

Who else but Legion would take demonic hallucinations and turn them into a “one true” Utopian dogma? Would any other entity, other than Legion, carefully nurture, sustain and deploy such depraved dogma with an all-encompassing ideology, and enforce it through the most withering and sustained propaganda assault ever imagined? Backed by a perverse “rule of law” and a heavily-armed police state? Who else but the most malevolent Legion would demand an entire species of humans to trust, honor, obey and fear such dogma? What kind of Legion would deny even the basic means of survival to those who stray from, or “fail” to “measure up” to such an ideology?

These were a few of the questions I asked myself as I stood in line to the entrance of the Multnomah County Courthouse several weeks ago, on a chilly, overcast Tuesday morning, just five days past Christmas. I stood there with several dozen others. Virtually all of us, judging from our downcast, bedraggled appearance, looked as if we belonged to Portland’s “struggling class.” Our purpose for standing in line was to clear the security check just on the other side of the building’s main entrance, one of the endless Homeland Security “improvements” to America’s surveillance society to have institutionalized itself within the past decade.

Holiday Season Study Hall

My teen-age daughter, Sofia, had come to visit two days earlier, on Sunday evening. She planned to stay over the post-Christmas week through New Year’s Day. The task she assigned to me was to assist her with putting together a mock four-page “newspaper”–part of a class project assigned by her English teacher. The tabloid’s “theme” centered on the “life stories” of a handful of characters from The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros’ “coming-of-age” novella based on Cisneros’ own life experiences. Sofia figured there was a good chance I’d retained a few of the newspaper production skills I had acquired over a decade and a half earlier while publishing my ’zine, Paperback Jukebox. Or at least she hoped I could call on the minimum necessary to help her pull her project together.

That week with my daughter, working on her class project, turned into the most fun I had in quite some time, despite the brief interruption imposed by the “eviction process.” Sofia whipped out four interesting, creative and (at moments) hilarious vignettes focused on the life struggles faced by a handful of Mango characters. I’m sure we overdid it–spending hours and hours each day at our computers writing, editing and laying out the copy into newsprint format. Funny French hip-hop, house and rave tunes streaming through the web from one of the college stations in Angers, Lille, Orleans, Paris or Toulouse entertained us while we toiled. Trust me, nothing puts a smile on your face faster than hardcore rap rhymed in French. I tried to talk Sofia into coming to my eviction court appointment with me, but she took off for dance rehearsal instead.

Paths Of Least Resistance

My path to eviction court seemed almost inevitable. By the time I got laid off from work last year on July 1st, I was already in the financial hole. The monthly paycheck my employer allotted to me–lower than my basic monthly expenses–was cut by one third two months before my layoff. The same-day email from the company’s president informing me I no longer had a job hit my in-box before my previous month’s paycheck landed in my bank account. June’s paycheck, in fact, was ultimately delivered only in portions that were dribbled out to me over the next seven months–and then only after relentless arm-twisting.

Accelerating my forced march to the eviction courts was an unemployment insurance “award” just large enough to cover roughly half of my basic expenses. What little was left of my savings evaporated almost instantly. Originally scheduled for a two month duration, the “payroll holiday” my employer had sent me on turned into a permanent vacation. I uncovered that fact after I tried slinking back to my desk on September 1st, when my “holiday” was originally scheduled to expire. On September 7th, a week after reporting back to work, I received an email from the company president that read “We are still not in a position to start you back. Please wait before you start any work.”

After This The Judgment

After clearing the security checkpoint at the entrance to the Multnomah County Courthouse, my task was to report for my 9:00 a.m. appearance before the eviction judge in room 120. There I would join other down-and-outers who some landlord or property manager was looking to rid themselves of. Although I got into the courtroom about 10 minutes early, it was already packed full. Everybody there was either a “defendant” facing eviction from her or his home, or a “plaintiff” (or more likely, the plaintiff’s representative) looking to evict.

I immediately saw that the eviction business is a thriving one. The courtroom, packed full of evictees there for the 9:00 a.m. session, came on the heels of a similar courtroom full of evictees who had showed up for their 8:30 a.m. court date. Despite overflowing courtrooms of people scheduled in half-hour increments for “homestead removal” by “ownership security,” only about one in ten names the judge called out had even bothered to show up.

Once our names were called, the judge instructed us to meet with the property owner (or representative) in the hallway outside the courtroom to try and work out a deal. The representative for Lovejoy Station, the building I live in, was a portly and pallid man, on the youngish side of middle age, with thinning, close-cropped hair. Attired in a rumpled, light gray suit, presumably acquired from Men’s Warehouse or Ross Dress For Less, he declined to provide his business card, telling me I’d find his name at the bottom of whatever agreement we would decide on. Indeed, afterward I saw the eviction professional’s illegible autograph scrawled on the signature line at the bottom of our “agreement.” Later I would discover this mystery evictor came from Wally Lemke, LLC, a Portland-based residential real estate investor. But for now, in lieu of a readable name, let’s just call him Plumpty Dumpty.

After observing the brisk business the eviction industry was doing, I figured ol’ Plumpty–being an eviction industry “professional” and all–could show me the “eviction ropes.” Mr. Dumpty, Esq. asked if I wanted to remain in my apartment. I assured him that I did. Plumpty asked me if I could let him know when I could pay my past-due rent. I told him that my former boss told me earlier that morning that he could put me back to work by January 10th. Noting that I probably wouldn’t receive my first paycheck until the end of January, I told Mr. Dumpty that I could probably take care of December’s rent at that time, then pay off January and February’s rent at the end of February.

My leisurely payment timetable just didn’t fly at all with Plumpty, who wasted no time in declaring my proposal a non-starter. Dumpty demanded that I come up with $1000 in just over a week–by Wednesday, January 7th. I pointed out that if I were so clever a swindler or ruthless an armed-robber that I could produce a big wad of cash that fast I’d already be working on Wall Street. Plumpty refused to budge, so I asked if he could show me how the professionals on Wall Street work their magic with the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Congress. Armed with such knowledge, maybe I could arrange my own bailout and wire him the money by the 7th.

Dumpty grew weary from my incessant questioning and informed me that I had the “option of voluntarily vacating the premises.” If I were to demonstrate my willingness to “go quietly” away, Plumpty promised that Bowen Property Management (management company for the Lovejoy Station Apartments) would “drop charges.” Maybe Dumpty was getting tired of questions, but I wasn’t. I asked him to advise me on homeless bum protocol: “After sheriff’s deputies deposit me and my belongings onto the sidewalk, is it customary for the property manager to provide me with an abandoned shopping cart and my first bottle of fortified wine?” It seemed to me the least they could do was to assist me with putting the right foot forward in my newfound life as homeless vagabond.

Plumpty and I finally settled on the following payment schedule:
- $1000 by January 10, 2009
- $1360 by January 24, 2009
- $1080 by February 5, 2009
- $1080 by March 5, 2009
I signed the Circuit Court of the State of Oregon for the County of Mulnomah’s “Residential Eviction (Landlord / Tenant) Agreement Between Parties” for Case No.: 08F-0211311 knowing that I had no idea if I’d successfully find a way to pay according to the plan’s schedule.

SOB Story: Bend Over, Get Screwed, Pick Up The Tab

Plumpty Dumpty’s payment schedule included an additional $200 in miscellaneous fees and court costs. I wondered how it was that we, the “little people,” would allow ourselves no control over when our incomes switch on or off. And after finding ourselves suddenly bereft of means, a situation imposed without our consent, how is it that we are still not absolved from paying all costs that result from events we did not create and cannot control?

For instance, I desired no part in Wall Street’s funny money antics that destroyed viable economies all over the globe. Wall Street’s “weapons of economic mass destruction” are the apparent trigger of the catastrophic meltdown afflicting the livelihoods of real people all over the world. The carnage Wall Street’s weapons produced also contributed to the decision my employer made to remove me from the company payroll.

Why was I not consulted before the decision was made to calculate unemployment insurance compensation to “award” payments that would fail to pay the basic living expenses of the formerly employed? Finding an employer to tell me “you’re hired” is a process that requires the consent of at least two parties: the job seeker and the job provider. As the job seeker, I’m just one part of this decision-making process. So what’s legitimate about a process that can compel me to take up residence in some shop owner’s doorway if I am only granted partial control over the “your hired” part?

I took the initiative in trying to negotiate an alternative arrangement with Bowen Property Management so I could keep my apartment. I did this by offering to make an in-kind contribution to their enterprise until my ability to pay rent was restored. Bowen Property Management refused my proposal and took me to court instead.

After getting nowhere with Bowen Property Management, I sought intervention from someone at Portland’s Housing Authority. (They are in charge of the subsidies received by the owners of income-restricted rentals like Lovejoy Station.) Juli Garvey (the social worker, not the Penthouse porn star)–the person someone at HAP suggested I contact–did not return my email or phone call. I repeatedly took the initiative, but was given no control over the response (or lack thereof) my efforts would bring. So why am I stuck with the results?

Clearly my petty travails are almost insignificant when compared alongside the intense struggles countless people around the world deal with every day. Things are tough all over. We’ve all got problems of our own, and certainly don’t have time to think about anyone else’s little grievances. But here’s the challenge we share: we–our society, culture, political economy, or which ever “we” you care to choose–are destroying ourselves and everything around us. Given everything we’ve witnessed in recent years, surely even the dimmest among us must have some sense of this by now.

Take It As A Fairy Tale

“Sententious” is one of the short stories that make up Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov’s harrowing accounts of suffering and death imposed on millions of people forced into slave labor in the “arctic death camps” of Kolyma. Located in northeastern Siberia, above the Arctic Circle, Kolyma was the most notorious section of “Comrade” Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but estimates of the total number of inmates to perish in Kolyma’s slave labor camps run as high as three million. Prisoners died from the extreme cold, brutal working conditions, starvation or extreme malnutrition, unimaginably poor living conditions, beatings (or worse) from camp guards and fellow prisoners, summary execution and other tortures.

The everyday torments of slow starvation, lice infestation, unendurable workloads, hostile surroundings and the realization that they were doomed was probably the most deadly set of maladies afflicting the lives of the “goners” unfortunate enough to wind up in Kolyma’s death camps. Shalamov writes:

What remained with me ’till the very end? Bitterness. And I expected this bitterness to stay with me ’till death. But death, just recently so near, began to ease away little by little. Death was replaced not by life, but by semiconsciousness, an existence which had no formula and could not be called life.

Given such overwhelming despair, it’s understandable how Shalamov, like others imprisoned with him in the camps, would find themselves merely existing in a semiconscious, bitter state who none would call “life.” At the root of such profound bitterness is the deepest cynicism. Shalamov explains:

There is an Arab saying: “He who asks no questions will be told no lies.” That wasn’t the case here. I couldn’t have cared less if I was being told lies or the truth. The camp criminals have a cruel saying which is even more appropriate here–it expresses a deep contempt for the questioner: “If you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale.” I neither asked questions nor listened to fairytales.

The Ownership Society Tales

Like Shalamov, I have no interest in fairy tales. Unlike the man considered one of Russia’s greatest writers, I’ve lived a relatively pampered, privileged and pain-free life. The fate imposed on those driven into a bitter, semi-conscious half-life is not mine. There is no justifiable reason why I should not ask questions; the opposite is true. The same is true for any living human.

A good place to start is by asking “What kind of culture deprives so many of their neighbors of a reliable place to live? Can a political economy that casts so many people from their homes have any legitimacy? Why does the much-heralded ‘marketplace’ fail to ‘work’ for so many?” One can easily keep asking an almost endless number of related questions, but these three are as good a start as any I can think up right now.

One thing that I’ve both wrestled with and admired, that [Soros] conquered many years ago, is the ability to go from long to short, the ability to turn on a dime when confronted with the evidence. Emotionally, that is really hard. … ¶

I think that my [Soros] conceptual framework, which basically emphasises the importance of misconceptions, makes me extremely critical of my own decisions … I know that I am bound to be wrong, and therefore am more likely to correct my own mistakes.
— Chrystia Freeland, “The credit crunch according to Soros.”, The Financial Times

There is a generalized sense now that the future we expected does not work and that we are in front of what Michel Foucault called an ‘epistemic break’: a sudden image-shift in consciousness in which the once unthinkable becomes thinkable.
— Ivan Illich, “The Shadow Our Future Throws”, NPQ: New Perspectives Quarterly

Mindlessly pointing fingers in search of “someone” to blame is pointless. The property management company that is evicting me has a job to do. Part of that job is to collect rents from the tenants living in the buildings it manages. The building owners want a “return” on “investment.” Property owners want rent-paying tenants, not freeloading squatters. Juli Garvey, the social worker over at the Housing Authority of Portland (not the porn star from the House of Pent) who failed to respond to my email is probably overworked. It’s quite possible she never even received my query. In fact I was not able to confirm her contact info on the HAP website, and the results of a Google search linked her to another organization.

But it was the link to Ms Garvey’s other organization that revealed a partial answer to one of my previous questions. Turns out she was the contact person for an internal job posting her organization offered several years back. In exchange for 12 hours of labor per week (“collecting rent, light paperwork, performing light housekeeping tasks and organizing resident meetings”) the lucky candidate would receive “rent-free 2-bedroom apartment.”

I offered even more hours of labor per week to Bowen Property Management in exchange for them holding off on evicting me from my two bedroom place. I offered my considerably greater qualifications than those required in the job post Ms Garvey was responsible for filling. Bowen Property Management had an opportunity to apply my skills to its real business needs. All I asked in exchange was their willingness to let me keep my home. When Bowen failed to come through, I took my case to the property manager’s presumed “authority”–Portland’s Housing Authority, in fact. But phone calls and emails to this particular “authority” just sink into the void.

The least informed of all appear to be orthodox economists. Most are busy engaged in arcane and irrelevant research well distanced from the real world of global financial engineering. They have befuddled consumers with convoluted arguments that explain (for example) that property prices rise because of “supply and demand” for housing, not because of “easy money”. We are about to discover that demand for houses shrinks massively when the tide of “easy money” flows out of the economy.
- Globalisation: sleepwalking to disaster.

Freedom’s Hollow Ring: Whitey On The Moon

You may cling to a dizzying array of rationalizations to convince yourself that “the free market works.” Perhaps you opine that if the “free market” isn’t “working” for a particular individual it’s because that person fails to “play by the rules.” You may believe that anyone lacking the ability or willingness to “take advantage” of all the “opportunities” the “free market” offers gets what she or he deserves. But the sad and bewildered faces I witnessed when I showed up for eviction court told a different story. These people clearly thought they were “playing by the rules.” But that didn’t stop the “free market” from forcing them from their homes.

A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey’s on the moon.
I can’t pay no doctor bills but Whitey’s on the moon.
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still while Whitey’s on the moon.

Loosely borrowing from an old slogan once favored by pro-abortion crusaders: “Keep your dogma off my reality.” Whether or not you agree with any of my assertions or observations is irrelevant. If I lack the cash to pay my rent because I spend all day jacking off to screen images of my favorite Wicked Weasel bikini contributor, why should you care? When I’m ready to pry my eyes off those wicked lovelies, pull my clammy hands out of my boxers and get back to work, what do I find? What kind of “freedom” does neoliberalism’s “market” offer me? The freedom to migrate from a sticky situation of my own making to the world’s oldest hustle: mandatory membership in the coerced servitude of the “flexible labor pool.”

The man just upped my rent last night ’cuz Whitey’s on the moon.
No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey’s on the moon.
I wonder why he’s uppin’ me. ’Cuz Whitey’s on the moon?
I was already givin’ him fifty a week but now Whitey’s on the moon.

As for the “free market’s” supposed “legitimacy,” you ain’t convinced yet about how that cat’s long since escaped the bag? Wall Street’s ongoing, protracted and catastrophic “meltdown” should tell you that. The frantic looting of the Treasury, Federal Reserve and the American taxpayer by the Street’s “players” drove the last nail in the “legitimacy” coffin. But what kind of madness would drive the free market’s most ardent supporters to scuttle their own ship?

Taxes takin’ my whole damn check,
The junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin’ up,
And as if all that shit wasn’t enough…

Evidence exposing the “free market system” as a stupendous, ongoing global catastrophe is hard to miss. Such evidence is far more pervasive than any notion that “free market” globalism contributes to any net good. So why, after it has lost all credibility, do defenders of “the free market system” continue to pledge their allegiance? What insatiable avarice drives those who “play” this hideous game to shove all encumbrances aside–like a living soul or healthy conscience? Why are the “free market’s” primary losers folks who are either trying–or are forced–to “play by the rules”? Why do the losers continue playing such a losing game? And why is money called filthy lucre?

A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell but Whitey’s on the moon.
Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon?
How come there ain’t no money here? Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon.

What kind of “free market” is driven by greed and fear? How could it possibly represent any sort of freedom, or offer anything of value? In medieval Europe, greed and fear contrived the “Enclosure” to deprive the people of their “Commons.” The Commons was land upon which poor peasants eked out a modest subsistence. There they provided for their own welfare.

Ya know, I just about had my fill of Whitey on the moon.
I think I’ll send these doctor bills,
airmail special…
to Whitey on the moon.

Greed and fear drove colonists to the “New World”–what we now call The Americas. Upon arrival, the New World’s invaders used greed and fear-induced rationalizations to exterminate the people they found already living in their “New World.” Greed and fear launched slave ships. Those ships came back with slaves–the most un-free people of all–to labor in greed and fear’s plantations. What kind of “freedom” can greed and fear possibly bring?

From
“Whitey on the Moon”
By Gil-Scott Heron (1972)

What is “free” about a coercive political-economic system that enforces participation among its “players” in what resembles an abusive relationship? Where does one locate the battered victims shelter to escape the “free market’s” abuse? What hotline does one call to report such abuse? How does the “free” in “free market” make any sense unless such “freedom” means “free from concern for people, communities, nature or any living being”? What kind of demonic “need” justifies this kind of “freedom”? Is the “freedom” I desire to “free” you of anything I can take from you the kind of “freedom” you really want?

…Just The Best Way Human Beings Have Ever Discovered…

A few months ago Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein appeared on a TV talk show to promote her book. There to debate Klein from an opposing perspective was The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan. When Klein compared the “free market’s” dogma with communist and socialist ideologies Sullivan vehemently objected, claiming “the free market is not an ideology, it’s just the best way human beings have ever discovered of actually creating wealth.”

Now isn’t that a laugh! I suppose we could say that “communism is not an ideology, it’s just the best way human beings have ever discovered of actually establishing a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production.” Or how ’bout this one: “Nazism is not an ideology, it’s just the most brutally direct way human beings have ever discovered of actually exterminating millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other Untermenschen with industrial efficiency.” Oooh oooh! Here’s another: “The neighborhood child molester is not really a serial rapist, just the best way perverted sociopaths lurking in your neighborhood’s dark corners have ever discovered of actually force-probing little boys’ “anal flowers” to provide them the inspiration they need to grow into tough, macho men.

The problem with all of these “non-ideologies” (and “non-crimes”) is they tend to come with unavoidable side-effects. With Capitalism’s wealth-creation machine comes discarded humans and other living beings, massive imprisonment, actual or near-slavery, non-stop warmongering, torture, environmental carnage, unimaginable waste and spiritual death. Communism’s classless collectives somehow also manage to brilliantly organize gulags, slave-labor camps, genocidal great leaps forward, massive starvation and internal campaigns of terror and wanton slaughter. Nazism’s masterful creativity with gas ovens, industrialized death camps and assembly-line crematoria proved its utility for producing a whole country chock full o’ Good Germans. And the neighborhood “anal prober” is wonderfully effective at providing society with angry jocks, drunken frat boys, television evangelists and “capitalist tools.”

In Silencing Ivan Illich: A Foucauldian Analysis of Intellectual Exclusion author David Gabbard considers the “potential advantages” available through “disrupting the certainty that human beings have become so comfortable with in qualifying their knowledge.” Gabbard suggests employing Michel Foucault’s Archaeology (The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse On Language) to dispense with “the traditional dualism of subjectivity versus objectivity” and “turn our backs on those who would argue that social and political decisions should be based on ‘facts’” as espoused by “those who have the ‘facts’ straight” (pages 15 - 16).

But Gabbard himself points out that once “the solidity” of the “reality against which to bounce those ‘facts’ has begun to crumble” these supposed “facts” themselves become vulnerable. They’re ready to expose as delusions they are. Do we really need the lens of Foucault’s Archaeology through which to analyze such discourse? Although a Katrinian analysis is arguably a more precise tool to explain the depredations that come with neoliberal economics, for delivering a quick sucker punch I’ll admit to my fondness for the Hortonian approach instead. Thus, when I catch someone spouting some dimwitted drivel over the television airwaves (or YouTube’s “net waves” in my case) like “free market” neoliberalism “is not an ideology” but just the best way of going about the business of global pillage and plunder, I consider it my sacred duty to respond by comparing such nastiness with the damage done by your neighborhood’s predatory sociopath. Only the scale is different: one’s macroeconomics, the other is micro terror. Both wreak havoc, grief and destruction.

Boiled down to its essence, every ideology or dogma–whether political, religious, spiritual, institutional or anal–is merely another grandiose excuse to proclaim “we are right, and they are wrong.” If “they” refuse to uphold your “righteousness” by failing to adhere to your beliefs in the manner you specify, then “they deserve” any punishment you choose to mete out. After all, “they had their chance.” “They knew the consequences” of “straying from the truth” you bestowed upon them. Therefore, “they deserve their fate.” It’s exactly this sort of madness, unhinged from any living soul, that provokes the first goose-step in the forced-march to murder, genocide, war and oblivion.

Waste, Fraud And Abuse

Just because apologists for the spurious “free market” appear to believe their own bullshit, why should any sane person believe such nonsense? One doesn’t need to travel far to point to obvious evidence to expose “free market” activity–even that which “follows the rules”–as a nuisance, fraud, sham or worse.

Every day I receive fraudulent robo-calls advising me of an “important announcement” the robot caller must deliver concerning my credit card, my car insurance or some other “crisis.” I’ve done without credit cards, cars and car insurance for years. I registered my telephone numbers with the National Do Not Call list years ago, and have kept those registrations active. One must assume these robo-call hucksters “play” by the “free market rules.” If not, the major telecoms could shut them down instantly.

On my desk is a stack of about three or four hundred spam faxes. They began polluting my fax machine almost immediately after I registered for San Francisco’s 2007 ad:tech conference (“The Event For Digital Marketing!”) a couple of years ago. Consisting mostly of “Memos” to “All Employees” from the “Corporate Travel Department,” legalistic-looking “FINAL NOTICE OF DOMAIN EXTENSION” from the “Domain Support Service,” pitches for health insurance and stock tips–virtually every fax I received is engaged in fraud or obfuscation of some kind. Am I to presume the ad:tech conference–as well as all the fraudulent fax spammers ad:tech sold my fax number to–are “playing” by the “free market’s” “rules”?

Also sitting on my desk are dubious pitches I received through the U.S. Mail. Here’s one that screams “Foreclosures in America are at an all time high!” while begging recipients to “Let me show you how to use this opportunity to make a cash fortune!” And that is merely the pitch on the outside of the envelope. Oooh! Look at this “American Investor’s Guide” informing me that “American Onshore Drilling is the Answer to Energy Independence & Wealth.” It even features a picture of the newly-elected President Obama and includes Obama’s “immediate call to action.” And here’s my “reminder” from “Liberty Names”–a company I’ve never done business with–“reminding” me of to renew one of my domain names. Unfortunately for Liberty Names, this particular domain is renewed annually for free by another company that I actually do business with. You betcha! All these assholes must certainly “play by the rules” governed by “free market capitalism.”

Now for a quick look at my email spam. The subject lines alone are a barrel o’ fun: “She’ll throw away the vibrator after this.” Gosh! Whatever it is it sounds pretty good! “Payment Accepted!” Hmmm… Wonder what that payment was for? “Give your woman multiple climax’s!” Jeez! Makes me almost want to bring another woman into my life after so many years of happily doing without… “Easy way to lengthen your tool.” Yeah, right! I still remember the time I ordered that “dick enlarger” I saw advertised in the back of Mad Magazine when I was a teenager. The only thing they sent me was a cheap little magnifying glass! But had it been a real dick enlarger maybe I would have been able to “Show her who the REAL man is.”

“T” Stands For “Trouble”

So far I’ve only complained about the nuisance crap at the periphery of the “free market.” It gets even worse once major corporations adopt similar tactics. Particularly when they abuse their customers with such nonsense. For instance, after it came to light that the original two-month “payroll holiday” my employer sent me on would become indefinite, I realized that I’d have to start figuring out which bills I could still pay, and begin negotiating payment plans for the others. This process quickly revealed the necessity of putting my cell phone plan on “pause.” My bill was still current, so I called T-Mobile to find out what kind of deal we could arrange. Their offer: pay my entire bill now; keep paying it every month and act as if nothing had changed.

Obviously T-Mobile’s “offer” fell outside my ability to accept it. Their customer service person politely sympathized with my concerns, but said she could do nothing more. But not to worry! As soon as my bill was “overdue” other customer service people would be “authorized” to “make arrangements” that would presumably be closer to my ability to keep. Turned out her assurances were either misinformed or worse. After my bill went overdue, and as T-Mobile ultimately shut off my service, I made repeated attempts to work out a payment plan that I could maintain, calling numerous departments and even visiting T-Mobile’s downtown Portland retail store. Every attempt was refused, while the customer “service” got progressively less polite.

At this point T-Mobile’s internal collections department harassed me daily. I kept attempting to work something out with them, but their best offers were essentially to divide my past-due balance into three equal payments spread out over a week or so. Then once I had that taken care of they still required me to keep making regular monthly payments on my service because my two-year contract had not expired. Of course, their “offers” were worthless to me. If the best T-Mobile could do was to demand that I pay my bill on schedule as usual, what’s the point in making “payment arrangements”? But at last I convinced a T-Mobile collections rep to accept a $20 payment, with the promise that I’d keep making $20 payments until I got caught up. She was not happy about doing this, and made her displeasure abundantly clear. Never-the-less, I finally had a deal… Or so I thought.

About a week after making that first $20 payment to T-Mobile, and just as I was about to call in my second $20 payment, I received another bill. I couldn’t find any reference to the $20 payment I’d made the previous week, but noticed right away that T-Mobile had tacked on an additional couple of hundred bucks to my bill. I quickly called T-Mobile, keyed in my mobile number as their voice prompt demanded, and then was informed by their robo-operator that I would not be allowed to speak to live customer service representative until I paid my bill.

T-Mobile’s mendacity didn’t stop there. Shortly after they began refusing to take my calls, they handed me off to a 3rd party collections agency. That collections agency tacked on an additional two or three hundred bucks onto my bill and pummeled me with relentless robo-calls. My phone’s caller I.D. displayed the spoofed phone numbers used by the collections agency to mask who was calling. Abuse, fraud and deception: just another “play” in the book of “free market” “rules”?

Before I got into trouble with T-Mobile, I’d carried at least one mobile phone without interruption since 1993. Sometimes I had two live mobile phones at the same time. In the early years, dealing with the carriers was not terribly difficult. When a problem surfaced, usually a phone call would take care of it. Towards the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s the customer service got worse and worse. Dealing with service or billing issues often required multiple calls and lots of haggling. Even so, the customer abuse I experienced when trying to deal with T-Mobile astonished me.

How Much Rope?

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin predicted that “Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Instead, capitalists sold the Soviet Union bulldozers good ol’ “Uncle Joe” Stalin’s collectivist goons used to push the bodies of prisoners killed in his slave labor camps into mass graves. Decades later the capitalists lost their best friend after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Now when folks living in the “West” complain about the many predations the capitalist “system” inflicts on people, natural environments and other living beings, old smears like “commie” or “pinko” fail to pack the same social control “punch” that they once possessed. The “terrorist” smear looked like a worthy replacement for a few years, but the “free market’s” ruthless enforcers quickly overplayed that hand. Despite the easy ride it got after its commie playmates went away, the “free market” relentlessly proves itself more skilled with self-destruction than “self-correction.”

The little hang-up from T-Mobile that I described above is just a minor, yet revealing, example. T-Mobile managed not only to destroy a relationship with their customer–they went even further and destroyed the customer. Not only do I want nothing more to do with T-Mobile, I also lack any desire to even carry a cell phone. Now that’s slammin’ the ball outta the park, T-Mobile! Instead of “selling the rope,” you have built your own scaffold and have put your own noose around your own neck. And you demonstrate your eagerness to pull all other mobile providers onto your scaffold with you.

To be fair, what more can one expect from those operating within a system that demands its operators take as much as they can grab in exchange for as little as they are forced to part with. Greed and fear. Buy low, sell high. Caveat emptor. Profit maximization. Each of these marketplace maxims focuses on the desired outcome rather than the relationship or the experience. If we call communists “reds,” socialists “pinkos,” fascists “brown shirts,” what’s the most appropriate pejorative for capitalists? “Filthy lucres,” anyone?

When Granta Books published John Gray’s False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism in 1998, the book immediately found a hostile reception. Gray derided the “militancy” of America’s “commitment” to the “project” of “global laissez-faire” by the “world’s last great Enlightenment regime.” Writing for the New Statesman, liberal economist Paul Krugman began his critique with “John Gray surely expects economists in general, and perhaps me in particular, to denounce him as an ignoramus; I will not disappoint him.” Krugman proceeded to slam Gray for “garbled” economic analysis and sneered at his explanation of America’s weakening “traditional social bonds.” Krugman justified his harsh words by referring to the economic textbook assigned to him in his sophomore year.

As an historian, Gray is at least smart enough to understand that real idiots are those who learn from textbooks. This rule applies even to future Nobel Laureates. False Dawn was published in a year (1998) when “free market” hubris was arguably at its zenith. The dotcom mania had yet to plummet to its ignoble nadir. American triumphalism over Soviet Union’s collapse was not yet the near universal embarrassment it would later become. It was a hard year to expose neoliberal globalism for the emerging catastrophe it was. Gray undeniably tossed quite a few Molotov cocktails at plenty of targets. Not all tosses were well-aimed. But many of Gray’s strongest assertions proved incredibly prescient. Perhaps none more so than the storm clouds he saw gathering over Wall Street and other global centers of finance:

Global laissez-faire may break down in an unmanageable crisis of the world’s stock markets and financial institutions. The enormous, practically unknowable virtual economy of financial derivatives enhances the risks of a systemic crash. … [page 198] ¶

(A) Wall Street Crash…(might)…act as the trigger (for) a global economic dislocation. … Ordinary Americans are not well-placed to endure protracted economic setback. The dismantling of the federal welfare state makes rising unemployment insupportable. If over a hundred million mutual fund holders lose large portions of their assets in a market cataclysm popular support for a tilt to protectionism will be irresistible. [page 224]

Understanding Freedom

In his famous CoEvolution Quarterly essay “Vernacular Values” philosopher, social critic and intellectual giant, Ivan Illich observes:

We have seen that wherever wage-labor expands, its shadow, industrial serfdom, also grows. Wage-labor, as the dominant form of production, and housework, as the ideal type of its unpaid complement, are both forms of activity without precedent in history or anthropology. They thrive only where the absolute and, later, the industrial state destroyed the social conditions for subsistence living. They spread as small-scale, diversified, vernacular communities have been made sociologically and legally impossible–into a world where individuals, throughout their lives, live only through dependence on education, health services, transportation and other packages provided through the multiple mechanical feeders of industrial institutions.

In “vernacular” language, this means that regular folks like you, me and just about everyone else are forced to serve the needs of a machine. This machine–whether a political ideology, religious dogma, economic “system,” or any other set of institutions–governs the kind of “freedoms” you and I are allowed. So even though there’s a sort of “commons” in my neighborhood–a dog park where I could set up a shanty, plant a garden, raise some chickens and thus provide my basic needs for myself–the “freedom” to actually do that is not made available to me.

Instead I am allowed the “freedom” to magically produce rent on time, whether or not the means to do so becomes available. If I fail to “take advantage” of this freedom, I am free to let sheriff’s deputies drag me, my cats and my belongings out onto the sidewalk. There those deputies are free to write me a citation for violating numerous city ordinances. But they will not extended to me the “freedom” to stop them. And surely freedom lies not in Portland, for fear of violating the city’s “sit/lie” law. Portland’s Business Alliance reportedly bought this anti-person travesty by greasing a few of the palms on Portland’s city council. That’s not surprising now that it’s come to light such palms often found engaged in one sort of “pocket pool” or another.

These are the only kinds of “freedoms” you’re “allowed” when you forget that any real freedom comes only to those willing to take it. Gandhi understood this. So did King. As did X, the Panthers and, judging from their Ning page, the RBG Worldwide 1 Nation. So did Christ. Each had/has a unique approach to finding freedom, expressing it, and offering to show others the way. All demonstrate that it’s up to you to set yourself free. So if I want to set up my shanty after our culture’s “ownership class” removes me from my current dwelling, maybe I can take lessons on how to accomplish this. Max Rameau’s Take Back The Land: Land, Gentrification And The Umoja Village Shantytown could possibly act as my guide. In fact, I have his book right here…

In another essay “The Message of Bapu’s Hut” (In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses, 1978-1990) Ivan Illich points to the slavery that the systems and institutions of “rich” countries force onto the citizens who live there. To highlight the West’s industrial hubris, Illich contrasts Gandi’s “hut” to the kind of house one typically finds in one of the “rich” countries of Europe or North America:

We must understand that all the furniture and other articles that we go on collecting in our lives will never give us the inner strength. These are, so to say, the crutches of a cripple. The more of such conveniences we have, the more our dependence on them increases and our life gets restrictive. …¶

A house fitted with all kinds of conveniences shows that we have become weak. The more we lose the power to live, the greater we depend upon the goods we acquire. It is like our depending upon the hospitals for the health of the people and upon the schools for the education of our children. Unfortunately both hospitals and schools are not an index of the health or the intelligence of a nation. Actually, the number of hospitals is indicative of the ill health of the people and schools of their ignorance. Similarly, the multiplicity of the facilities for living minimizes the expression of creativity in human life. …¶

I have come to the conclusion that it is wrong to think of the industrial civilization as a road leading towards development of man. It has been proved that for our economic development, bigger and bigger machines of production and larger and larger number of engineers, doctors and professors are not necessary. I am convinced that such people are poor in mind, body and life-style who would want to have a place bigger than this hut where Gandhi lived. I have pity for them. By doing this they surrender themselves and their animate self to the inanimate structure. In the process they lose the elasticity of their body and vitality of their life, they have little relationship with nature and closeness with their fellowmen. …¶

This hut of Gandhi demonstrates to the world how the dignity of the common man can be brought up. It is also a symbol of happiness which we can derive from practicing the principles of simplicity, service and truthfulness.

Illich understood that industrialized, consumerist societies enslave themselves to their own institutions. These societies trade the genuine freedom of self-sufficiency for the perceived comforts and security they think their institutional machines offer them. The people who make this Faustian pact rarely perceive what they’re doing, or when they cross the border–from their machines serving their “needs” and into self-imposed enslavement to the monstrosities they created.

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi’s magnum opus on laissez-faire capitalism, Polanyi exposes the delusional folly of “secular salvation through a self-regulating market” where the “substance of society itself” is subject to the “laws of the market.” The “free market” Polanyi described contained “three classical tenets: that labour should find its price on the market; that the creation of money should be subject to an automatic mechanism; that goods should be free to flow from country to country without hindrance or preference.” In other words, the “free” in “free market” has nothing to do with any “freedom” available to ordinary people over choosing how best to provide for themselves.

Much like “salvation” as perceived by modern-day “evangelicals,” or the “love” expressed by the wife beater, the meaning of “freedom” is a perverse distortion of its original meaning in the minds of many modern-day Americans. During a phone conversation with my dad last November, he expressed his concerns over my professional “priorities,” and emphasized his concerns in a follow-up email. Dad asked “What better way to insure (your) freedom than to have some income from work that you enjoy?” He closed with “I do not want to see you loose your freedom.” What poor old dad hasn’t yet realized is that we all lost our “freedom” long ago, settling for an industrialized serfdom instead. Dad still believes in fairy tales.

The Meaning Of Life

Mercifully, we humans haven’t totally forgotten what makes us free. And we still carry with us at least a basic understanding of how to live life. I saw it for myself earlier this month at the Aladdin Theater in Southeast Portland. That’s where my daughter danced with her dance crew, Urban Arts Dance Company, in a production featuring several other local dance talents called Brace Yourself. As the “junior” dance team that night, Sofia’s crew only got about ten minutes or so of stage time. Even so, they performed spectacularly and had a blast anyway.

More seasoned acts like like the all-Asian LDT (Liza’s Dream Team) and hip-hop heavy The Detail got considerably more stage time, and were all very impressive! But the most memorable performance came at the end of the night after the hysterically campy Jonté from New York took over the stage. Wearing a loose-fitting gold lamé (blouse?), and blonde hair plastered to the top of his head in a sort of bebop conk straight from Castro Street, Jonté could pass as RuPaul’s nephew.

His voice alternating from deep baritone to psychotic falsetto while a baseball cap-wearing “friend” grooved sensuously at his side, Jonté warbled out a lyric that sounded something like…

we do the 69
and we do it all the time
but doin’ it doggy style
always makes me smile

I was already laughing pretty hard. But then Mister superCamp knelt at the edge of the stage to thrust what could’ve been his codpiece (or maybe he was just happy to see us) out over the stage’s edge while belting out “PUSSY POP PUSSY POP PUSSY POP” in full baritone. At this point the dancecampy maestro had the entire house rolling on the floor.

But if you don’t believe me, just “take it as a fairy tale.”